What would be the best way to have multiple docker containers running on one server with https?

Question

So currently I have an Python Flask application. It is a basic script with different webhooks. For each new webhook I want to add I would need a different Docker container. So since I will be expanding the webhooks I must(?) use docker to setup multiple containers. But when I try to create different endpoints with a Dockerfile, I would have to create manually some endpoints in the nginx.conf and different sockets for uwsgi (or build a script which does all the sockets, endpoints etc.).

So what I basically want to achieve is:

Example.com/webhook1 (container1)
Example.com/webhook2 (container2)
Example.com/webhook3 (container3)
etc.

What would be my best approach to have different containers running with different endpoints?

My server is a Ubuntu server using NGINX as a reverse proxy with uwsgi, and certbot for the ssl cert.

Answer 1

There are multiple approaches to achieve this.

What I did was that I created a so called "master" NGINX container (or it can run on the host too) which communicates via port 443. Then I have set up all other container to use a different port (or you can also use UNIX Sockets). Then I've set up my "master" NGINX instance as a reverse proxy.

For example, lets see the following setup of NGINX instances:

Name	Location
Master NGINX	https://127.0.0.1:443/ OR https://example.com
Container 1	http://127.0.0.1:8801/webhook1
Container 2	http://127.0.0.1:8802/webhook2

In the master NGINX instance's config, you should have something like this:

location /webhook1 {
  proxy_pass       http://127.0.0.1:8801/webhook1;
}

location /webhook2 {
  proxy_pass       http://127.0.0.1:8802/webhook2;
}

You only have to use SSL on your "main" NGINX instance, as it's unnecessary when communicating on the same machine. Just make sure that your firewall denies access to all other internal NGINX instances.