Replicate Kubernetes Ingress using plain Nginx and Docker Compose in less than 5 minutes

We are using Kubernetes Ingress to deploy our web application.
(To know what is ingress, check out this really nice blog by Sandeep Dinesh)

For a sample application my-bank. The setup is done as shown below:

Kubernetes Ingress Setup for my-bank

We needed to replicate above setup in local machine for debugging purposes.

After exploring various alternatives including nginx-proxy (Thank you Kim Wuestkamp for this idea). For us, easiest workaround was using plain nginx and proxy_pass directive beautifully sewn together in a docker-compose file.

This is how the html page of our main app can be coded :

Notice that we only have to give relative path /employee/home in href and not full url even in local setup.

Employee as well as Customer service both have their Dockerfile ‘s like below:

nginx/conf.d/default.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name  localhost my-bank.com;

    location / {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
    }

    location /employee {
            proxy_pass http://employee:8081;
            proxy_set_header Host my-bank.com;
    }

    location /customer {
            proxy_pass http://customer:8080;
            proxy_set_header Host my-bank.com;
    }

    error_page   404 500 502 503 504  /error.html;
    location /error.html {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }
}

Above configuration instructs nginx to start main application at port 80 and proxy the request to 8080 and 8081 if url has /customer or /employee in it’s path respectively.

Finally to put it all together into a docker-compose :

Finally start the app using command docker-compose up and use docker-compose down --rmi 'all' to stop the application without any left-over images and containers.

As always, Entire code can be found at Github

Happy Coding :)

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