This is a minimalistic approach to allow a routing of external requests into a Docker Swarm while routing based on the public hostname.

Each service which should be routed has so enable the routing using labels.

The ingress service consists of a nginx server and a python script which periodically updates the nginx configuration. The service communicates with the docker daemon to retrieve the latest service configuration.

The Ingress service acts as a reverse proxy in your cluster. It exposes port 80 to the public an redirects all requests to the correct service in background. It is important that the ingress service can reach other services via the Swarm network (that means they must share a network).

docker service create --name ingress \
  --network ingress-routing \
  -p 80:80 \
  --mount type=bind,source=/var/run/docker.sock,destination=/var/run/docker.sock \
  --constraint node.role==manager \
  foxylion/swarm-ingress

It is important to mount the docker socket, otherwise the service can't update the configuration of nginx.

The ingress service should be scaled to multiple nodes to prevent short outages when the node with the ingress servic becomes unresponsive (use --replicas X when starting the service).

A service can easily be configured using ingress. You must simply provide a label ingress.host which determines the hostname under wich the service should be publicly available.

Additionally to the hostname you can also map another port and path of your service. By default a request would be redirected to http://service-name:80/.

It is important to run the service which should be used for ingress that it shares a network. A good way to do so is to create a common network ingress-routing (docker network create --driver overlay ingress-routing).

To start a service with ingress simply pass the required labels on creation.

docker service create --name my-service \
  --network ingress-routing \
  --label ingress.host=my-service.company.tld \
  nginx

It is also possible to later add a service to ingress using service update.

docker service update \
  --label-add ingress.host=my-service.company.tld \
  --label-add ingress.port=8080 \
  my-service