The NGINX Reverse Proxy Manager

NGINX proxy manager is a reverse proxy management system, that is based on NGINX with a nice and clean web UI. You can also obtain trusted SSL certificates, manage several proxies with individual configs, customizations, and intrusion protection. It is open-source and maintained GitHub. It’s perfect for small environments like home labs or small server environments. You can easily expose any web service or application with it. It includes a free SSL certificate management by letsencrypt that can also be used to obtain wildcard certs. To deploy the NGINX proxy manager you need a small MySQL database container and the NGINX container. Let’s have a look at how to deploy this easily with docker-compose.

Create a DNS A record for your sub domain that points to your server

Create a new A record on my server that is called “proxy.example.com” that points to the public IP of the virtual server.

Deploy NGINX Proxy Manager in docker

Create the docker-compose file. Create the new project folder in the /opt directory called nginxproxymanager. Then I create a docker-compose.yaml file with the following template.

version: '3'
services:
  app:
    image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest'
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '81:81'
      - '443:443'
    restart: always
    environment:
      DB_MYSQL_HOST: "db"
      DB_MYSQL_PORT: 3306
      DB_MYSQL_USER: ${USERNAME}
      DB_MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${PASSWORD}
      DB_MYSQL_NAME: ${MYSQLNAME}
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt
  db:
    image: 'jc21/mariadb-aria:10.4'
    restart: always
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${ROOTPASSWD}
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ${DATABASE}
      MYSQL_USER: ${USERNAME}
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - ./data/mysql:/var/lib/mysql

The Password file

Store passwords in plain text is not a good idea. Create .env file with the following content:

USERNAME=proxy
PASSWORD=supergeheim
MYSQLNAME=npm
ROOTPASSWD=rootsupergeheim
DATABASE=npm

Notice: Please change the names and take strong passwords, not npm.

Start the NGINX Proxy Manager stack with the following command.

docker-compose up -d

Login to the web UI of NGINX Proxy Manager

Now we can log in to the web UI. Simply use your browser to connect to your server by using the IP address or an FQDN and connect on port “81”. Log in with the username admin@example.com and the password changeme. Next, you should change your username and password, and that’s it!

Secure the NGINX Proxy Manager

If the NGINX Proxy Manager, Docker and Docker Compose are installed on the same server, the internal IP address is required.

ip addr show docker0
3: docker0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state DOWN group default
link/ether 02:42:5d:50:ff:be brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 172.17.0.1/16 brd 172.17.255.255 scope global docker0
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

The IP Address is: 172.17.0.1

Set up an new Proxy Host

Configure the details.

Set a Let's Encrypt certificate

Change to SSL.

The result of the configuration

The configuration details.