Traefik setup to run all docker containers on AWS EC2 instances behind the same port 80 and 443 with automated LetsEncrypt certificates creation and renewal.

First of all create new AWS EC2 instance, otherwise you need to guarantee that the existing one doesn't have anything listening on port 80 or port 443.

Now grab the IP address for it in order to point a domain to it.

Before starting the setup a domain needs to be set-ed to point at the EC2 instance.

For example if the demo.example.com is used, then each backend added will use it as their base domain. So when adding a backend for the python shapes api you give it the domain in the likes of python-shapes.demo.example.com, and for nodejs nodejs-shapes.demo.example.com.

Go ahead and configure a domain at Route53 or at any other provider, and point it to the IP address from the previous step.

NOTE: It's important that you add also a wild-card entry in the DNS record to point any sub-domain to the same IP.

Ensure that port 80 and 443 are open.

yum install -y git

If the instance already has one, then just cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and add it to your Gitlab/Github account, otherwise create it first.

Let's start by cloning this repository:

git clone https://github.com/approov/aws-ec2-traefik-setup.git && cd aws-ec2-traefik-setup

Creating the .env file for Traefik:

sudo mkdir /opt/traefik && sudo cp ./traefik/.env.example /opt/traefik/.env

Customize the env. file with your values:

sudo nano /opt/traefik/.env

Traefik, Docker and Docker Compose will be installed and configured by running the bash script in the root of this repo:

./aws-ec2-setup.sh

The end of the output will look like this:

---> DOCKER COMPOSE VERSION <---
docker-compose version 1.25.5, build 8a1c60f6


---> GIT VERSION<---
git version 2.23.3


---> TRAEFIK installed at: /opt/traefik <---

From /opt/traefik folder you can ran any docker-compose command.

Some useful examples:

## Restart Traefik:
sudo docker-compose restart traefik

## Start Traefik:
sudo docker-compose up -d traefik

## Destroy Traefik:
sudo docker-compose down

## Tailing the Traefik logs in realtime:
sudo docker-compose logs --follow traefik

---> TRAEFIK is now listening for new docker containers <---

This setup script will let Traefik running and listening for incoming requests on port 80 and 443, where requests for port 80 will be redirected to port 443.

Traefik uses LetsEncrypt to automatically generated and renew TLS certificates for all domains is listening on, and the will keep the public key unchanged, thus a mobile app can implement certificate pinning against the public key without the concern of having the pin changed at each renewal of the certificate.

Let's see an example of deploying Python Shapes API backend into an EC2 instance listening at *.demo.example.com.

mkdir -p ~/backend && cd ~/backend

git clone https://github.com/approov/python-flask_approov-shapes-api-server && cd python-flask_approov-shapes-api-server

cp .env.example .env

Replace the default domain with your own server domain:

PYTHON_FLASK_SHAPES_DOMAIN=python-shapes.demo.example.com

Replace the dummy Approov secret on it with the one for your Approov account:

# approov secret -get base64
APPROOV_BASE64_SECRET=your-secret-here

sudo docker-compose up -d

Now in your browser visit python-shapes.demo.example.com to check the server is accepting requests.

sudo docker-compose logs -f

NOTE: No need to follow this for the above Deploy Server Example. You only need to follow this part when your project doesn't have yet Traekik labels in the docker-compose.yml file.

Traefik inspects the labels in all running docker containers to know for what ones needs to proxy requests.

So if your backend does not have yet support for Traefik in the docker-compose.yml file you can configure your service like this:

services:

    api:
        ...

        labels:
            - "traefik.enable=true"

            # The public domain name for your docker container
            - "traefik.frontend.rule=Host:api.demo.example.com"

            # Doesn't need to be exactly the same as the domain name.
            - "traefik.backend=api.demo.example.com"

            # The external docker network that Traefik uses to proxy request to containers.
            - "traefik.docker.network=traefik"

            # This is the internal container port, not the public one.
            - "traefik.port=5000"
...

networks:
    ...

    traefik:
        external: true

With this configuration all requests for https://api.demo.example.com will be proxy by Traefik to the docker container with the backend label traefik.backend=api.demo.example.com on the internal container network port traefik.port=5000.