Deploying Letsencrypt with Docker-Compose

October 06, 2017

Last week I wrote about setting up a reverse-proxy to serve a number any number of Docker containers via https.

In order for this technique to work with Docker-Compose, we need to add a network to the Docker-Compose container.

Premise

Let’s say you have a server, such a stage.example.com, where you are running a number of Docker-Compose based projects, and you want each of them to be available on HTTPS.

You might have previously set up projects on that server using the technique described in my last post, and now you want to deploy a docker-compose based project to the same server using a new domain, my-new-domain.example.com.

Here’s how to do it:

Step one: launch your Docker-compose project

Use the appropriate environment variables. A very simple Docker-compose file might look like:

version: '2'

services:
  httpd:
    image: httpd
    environment:
      VIRTUAL_HOST: my-new-domain.example.com
      LETSENCRYPT_HOST: my-new-domain.example.com
      LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL: me@example.com
    expose:
      - "80"

Run docker-compose up -d and your project will be up, but even though the environment variables are correctly set, your site will not be publicly available.

Step two: add your new network and restart your letsencrypt container

You can find your network id by typing docker network ls. It should be something like directory_name_default (we’ll use that in this example). You can also declare the network name in the compose file so it’s always the same.

Now that you know the network id (directory_name_default), you need to add it to the nginx-proxy container, and restart the nginx-letsencrypt container:

docker network connect directory_name_default nginx-proxy
docker restart nginx-letsencrypt