Docker uses Nginx to reverse the NodeJS server

Target

We will use NGINX as a reverse proxy for the NodeJS server

2 Docker images from Docker Hub will be used:

• NodeJS
• NGINX

environment

• NodeJS
• Docker

Example

NodeJS HTTP Service

We will create a simple node server. We will use the modules in httpnode and make a simple http server. The server.js file contains the code of our server

var http = require('http');
var server = http.createServer(function (request, response) {
  response.writeHead(200, {"Content-Type": "text/plain"});
  response.end("Node & Docker Running...");
});
server.listen(3333);
console.log("Node HTTP Server started at http://localhost:3333/");

If we run node server.js on the terminal, it will start the server on port 3333 of the local host

We can open the browser and visit http://localhost:3333/

Now, we want to create a docker image for our node server. To do this, we need to create a file named Dockerfile using the following command

FROM mhart/alpine-node
COPY server.js.
EXPOSE 3333
CMD node server.js

Here, I used mhart/alpine-node (Minimal Node.js Docker Image) to have a NodeJS environment

EXPOSE 3333 means 3333 as the access port

Now that we have the Dockerfile ready, we will build a Docker image from this file

docker build -t docknode.

I will now run the docker image, which will create a container for us

docker run -d -p 3333:3333 --name node-server docknode

After running this command, our NodeJS server should run node-server in a Docker container named

Nginx anti-generation

The NodeJS server in the Node Docker image is running, next we need to add the NGINX reverse proxy

Use the official NGINX image from DockerHub

FROM nginx
COPY default.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/

default.conf

server {
  location / {
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    proxy_pass http://server:3333;
  }
}

In the configuration, we have http://server:3333. This 3333 is the port from our NodeJS Docker container

docker build -t docknginx.

In order to verify that our image is available on our local machine, we can run the following command to view the list of images

docker images

Run Nginx anti-generation server container

docker run -d -p 8080:80 --link node-server:server --name nginx-proxy docknginx

After running the command, if we now go to the browser and click on http://localhost:8080/, we can see that our NodeJS application is now running on this port

We are actually accessing the NodeJS server through NGINX because it is used as a reverse proxy here