nginx-proxy sets up a container running nginx and docker-gen. docker-gen generate reverse proxy configs for nginx and reloads nginx when containers they are started and stopped.

See Automated Nginx Reverse Proxy for Docker for why you might want to use this.

To run it:

$ docker run -d -p 80:80 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock -t jwilder/nginx-proxy

Then start any containers you want proxied with an env var VIRTUAL_HOST=subdomain.youdomain.com

$ docker run -e VIRTUAL_HOST=foo.bar.com -t ...

Provided your DNS is setup to forward foo.bar.com to the a host running nginx-proxy, the request will be routed to a container with the VIRTUAL_HOST env var set.

FROM ubuntu:12.04
MAINTAINER Jason Wilder jwilder@litl.com

# Install Nginx.
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y python-software-properties wget supervisor
RUN add-apt-repository -y ppa:nginx/stable

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y nginx 
RUN echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

RUN mkdir /app
WORKDIR /app
ADD . /app

RUN wget https://github.com/jwilder/docker-gen/releases/download/0.1.2/docker-gen-linux-amd64-0.1.2.tar.gz
RUN tar xvzf docker-gen-linux-amd64-0.1.2.tar.gz

RUN mkdir -p /var/log/supervisor
ADD supervisor.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisor.conf

EXPOSE 80
ENV DOCKER_HOST unix:///tmp/docker.sock

CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]