How to run an NGINX Reverse Proxy server using Docker compose

Before we begin

Make sure you have docker installed on your system. If you are on windows, I have a short guide on how to install it in wsl

Create a directory to store your files

If you haven’t already, create a directory rto store your nginx configuration files and docker compose.

cd ~
mkdir nginx-server
cd nginx-server

Setup the docker compose file

First, we have to setup a docker compose file. Let’s start by creating one.

touch docker-compose.yml

docker-compose.yml

version: "3.8"
services:
  nginx:
    image: nginx:latest
    container_name: nginx_container
    ports:
      - 80:80
    volumes:
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Note: be careful in setting ports, and make sure ports mapped to containers are not used by other programs on your host machine.

Setup the nginx file

As we can see on the docker compose file, we mapped ./nginx.conf to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. So we would need to create an nginx.conf file in the same directory as our docker compose file.

touch nginx.conf

nginx.conf

events {
  ... # set nginx event parameters
}
http {
        server {
                listen 80;
                server_name <target-server-domain>;
                location / {
                    proxy_pass http://<target-server-ip>:<target-server-port>;
                    ... # Additional nginx server configs
                }
        }
 
        ... # Add more servers here
}

Note: For more information on additional configuration, you may refer to the official nginx documentation here.

Final steps

Once we got the above all setup, we can now start our docker container that runs our reverse proxy.

docker compose up --build

Make sure the web application pointed by the reverse proxy is running, and try accessing the target server domain, and it should show your target-server

And that’s it, you have just run your first nginx reverse proxy on a docker container.