How to properly configure HAProxy in Docker Swarm to automatically route traffic to replicated services (via SSL)? - docker

Question

I'm trying to deploy a Docker Swarm of three host nodes with a single replicated service and put an HAProxy in front of it. I want the clients to be able to connect via SSL.
My docker-compose.yml:
version: '3.9'
services:
proxy:
image: haproxy
ports:
- 443:8080
volumes:
- haproxy.cfg:/usr/local/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
deploy:
placement:
constraints: [node.role == manager]
networks:
- servers-network
node-server:
image: glusk/hackathon-2021:latest
ports:
- 8080:8080
command: npm run server
deploy:
mode: replicated
replicas: 2
networks:
- servers-network
networks:
servers-network:
driver: overlay
My haproxy.cfg (based on the official example):
# Simple configuration for an HTTP proxy listening on port 80 on all
# interfaces and forwarding requests to a single backend "servers" with a
# single server "server1" listening on 127.0.0.1:8000
global
daemon
maxconn 256
defaults
mode http
timeout connect 5000ms
timeout client 50000ms
timeout server 50000ms
frontend http-in
bind *:80
default_backend servers
backend servers
server server1 127.0.0.1:8000 maxconn 32
My hosts are Lightsail VPS Ubuntu instances and share the same private network.
node-service runs each https server task inside its own container on: 0.0.0.0:8080.
The way I'm trying to make this work at the moment is to ssh into the manager node (which also has a static and public IP), copy over my configuration files from above, and run:
docker stack deploy --compose-file=docker-compose.yml hackathon-2021
but it doesn't work.

Answer 1

Well, first of all and regarding SSL (since it's the first thing that you mention) you need to configure it using the certificate and listen on the port 443, not port 80.
With that modification, your Proxy configuration would already change to:
global
daemon
maxconn 256
defaults
mode http
timeout connect 5000ms
timeout client 50000ms
timeout server 50000ms
frontend http-in
bind *:80
default_backend servers
frontend https-in
bind *:443 ssl crt /etc/ssl/certs/hackaton2021.pem
default_backend servers
That would be a really simplified configuration for allowing SSL connection.
Now, let's go for the access to the different services.
First of all, you cannot access to the service on localhost, actually you shouldn't even expose the ports of the services you have to the host. The reason? That you already have those applications in the same network than the haproxy, so the ideal would be to take advantage of the Docker DNS to access directly to them
In order to do this, first we need to be able to resolve the service names. For that you need to add the following section to your configuration:
resolvers docker
nameserver dns1 127.0.0.11:53
resolve_retries 3
timeout resolve 1s
timeout retry 1s
hold other 10s
hold refused 10s
hold nx 10s
hold timeout 10s
hold valid 10s
hold obsolete 10s
The Docker Swarm DNS service is always available at 127.0.0.11.
Now to your previous existent configuration, we would have to add the server but using the service-name discovery:
backend servers
balance roundrobin
server-template node- 2 node-server:8080 check resolvers docker init-addr libc,none
If you check what we are doing, we are creating a server for each one of the discovered containers in the Swarm within the node-server service (so the replicas) and we will create those adding the prefix node- to each one of them.
Basically, that would be the equivalent to get the actual IPs of each of the replicas and add them stacked as a basic server configuration.
For deployment, you also have some errors, since we aren't interested into actually expose the node-server ports to the host, but to create the two replicas and use HAProxy for the networking.
For that, we should use the following Docker Compose:
version: '3.9'
services:
proxy:
image: haproxy
ports:
- 80:80
- 443:443
volumes:
- hackaton2021.pem:/etc/ssl/certs/hackaton2021.pem
- haproxy.cfg:/usr/local/etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
deploy:
placement:
constraints: [node.role == manager]
node-server:
image: glusk/hackathon-2021:latest
command: npm run server
deploy:
mode: replicated
replicas: 2
Remember to copy your haproxy.cfg and the self-signed (or real) certificate for your application to the instance before deploying the Stack.
Also, when you create that stack it will automatically create a network with the name <STACK_NAME>-default, so you don't need to define a network just for connecting both services.