letsencrypt-nginx-proxy is based on jwilder/nginx-proxy. It sets up a container running nginx and docker-gen. See Automated Nginx Reverse Proxy for Docker for why you might want to use this. In addition to the functionality that jwilder/nginx-proxy offers (reverse proxy configs for nginx and reloads nginx when containers are started and stopped) we use docker-gen to generate a SSL certificate from letsencrypt to secure the domain.
If you want to run it without SSL support, please have a look at the page for the jwilder/nginx-proxy. That's what you're actually looking for.
To run it:
docker-compose up -d
That's about it already. If you want to run it without docker-compose it would like this:
docker run -d --name nginx-proxy -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro -e LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=<your_email@domain.de> --restart=always eforce21/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy
You can configure the email address that should be used for certificate generation with letsencrypt with the environment variable LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL. If you do not set it, the email address will defaul to info@VIRTUAL_HOST.
By default this proxy will attempt to obtain a certificate for all containers that have a VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable. If you don't want SSL support for a certain container you can add a label to prevent certificate generation: letsencrypt.nocert. The value you assign is not checked right now. Only the existence of the label is enough to exclude for certificate generation. That's how it would look like with a run command: docker run -tid --label letsencrypt.nocert=true -e VIRTUAL_HOST=<your_domain> ubuntu
Alternatively, you can configure the proxy to never generate a certificate for a container unless it defines a label to request certificate generation. To do this you will need to start the container with the environment variable LETSENCRYPT_OPT_IN. The run command would look like this:
docker run -d --name nginx-proxy -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro -e LETSENCRYPT_EMAIL=<your_email@domain.de> -e LETSENCRYPT_OPT_IN=true --restart=always eforce21/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy
When the LETSENCRYPT_OPT_IN variable is present the proxy will look for containers with the label letsencrypt.cert and will generate certificate requests for them if they also have the VIRTUAL_HOST variable set. The run command would look like this: docker run -tid --label letsencrypt.cert=true -e VIRTUAL_HOST=<your_domain> ubuntu
If there's anything else you want to configure. Please also have a look at jwilder/nginx-proxy. There you'll find more beautiful documentation on how to do more magic with this reverse proxy.
We use Let's Encrypt to generate the SSL certificates. Those certificates are free and expire every 3 months.
We use docker-gen to watch for starting containers and generate a shell-script that will run Let's Encrypt. This will give you a SSL certificate in a matter of a couple of seconds. (So please don't worry when the certificate won't show up right after you start the container for the first time!). We use the --keep-until-expiring flag so you hopefully don't run into beta restrictions. That means the certificate will be renewed if it expires in 10 or less days automatically on container (re)start.
Additional we have cron installed in the container to check regularly that your SSL certificates don't expire as you might not (re)start your containers every 3 months. That check will be performed at 10am. If you want to change that, just change it in the cronfile.
latest is always taken from develop branch. Please do NOT consider it production ready. Use the versioned tags instead for production please!