This is the HTTP Proxy and DNS server that Dinghy uses.

The proxy is based on jwilder's excellent nginx-proxy project, with modifications to make it more suitable for local development work.

A DNS resolver is also added. By default it will resolve all *.docker domains to the Docker VM, but this can be changed.

As in the base nginx-proxy, you can configure a container's hostname by setting the VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable in the container. In addition, this proxy also auto-creates hostnames for docker-compose projects. The format is <container_name>.<compose_project_name>.<tld>. For example, for a container named web in a docker-compose project named myapp, you can visit http://web.myapp.docker to be proxied to that container, without setting VIRTUAL_HOST.

Since this functionality is generally useful for local development work even outside of Dinghy, this proxy now supports running standalone.

You'll need the IP of your VM. You can run docker-machine ip <machine_name> to get the IP if using docker-machine. Then start the proxy:

docker run -d --restart=always \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro \
  -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 19322:19322/udp \
  -e DNS_IP=<vm_ip> -e CONTAINER_NAME=http-proxy \
  --name http-proxy \
  codekitchen/dinghy-http-proxy

You will also need to configure OS X to use the DNS resolver. To do this, create a file /etc/resolver/docker (creating the /etc/resolver directory if it does not exist) with these contents:

nameserver <vm_ip>
port 19322

You only need to do this step once, or when the VM's IP changes.

For running Docker directly on a Linux host machine, the proxy can still be useful for easy access to your development environments. Similar to OS X, start the proxy:

docker run -d --restart=always \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro \
  -p 80:80 -p 443:443 -p 19322:19322/udp \
  -e CONTAINER_NAME=http-proxy \
  --name http-proxy \
  codekitchen/dinghy-http-proxy

The DNS_IP environment variable is not necessary when Docker is running directly on the host, as it defaults to 127.0.0.1.

Different Linux distributions will require different steps for configuring DNS resolution. The Dory project may be useful here, it knows how to configure common distros for dinghy-http-proxy.