Install Traefik Inside Docker Container in Linux

Traefik is a reverse proxy and load balancer for web applications. Traefik is is an open-source project available under the MIT license.

This tutorial explains how to install Traefik inside a Docker container in the Linux. Commands have been tested on Ubuntu.

Prepare environment

Make sure you have installed Docker in your system. If you are using Ubuntu, installation instructions can be found in the post.

Install Traefik

• Host network

Run the following command to create a container for Traefik that uses host network:

docker run -d --name=traefik --restart=always --network=host \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    traefik \
    --api.insecure=true --providers.docker

• User-defined bridge network

User-defined bridge network can be used for listening on different port. By default, Traefik service is listening for HTTP connections on port 80. The dashboard is available on port 8080. Both ports can be changed with -p option.

docker network create app-net

docker run -d --name=traefik --restart=always --network=app-net \
    -p 8081:80 -p 8082:8080 \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    traefik \
    --api.insecure=true --providers.docker

Testing Traefik

To access the Traefik dashboard, open a web browser and go to http://<IP_ADDRESS>:8080, where <IP_ADDRESS> is the IP address of the system.

Uninstall Traefik

To completely remove Traefik, remove its container:

docker rm --force traefik

Remove Traefik image:

docker rmi traefik

If a user-defined bridge network was created, you can delete it as follows:

docker network rm app-net