02 - Routing and SSL certificates - Traefik and Portainer

Route HTTP(s) requests to your services and secure them with Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates with Traefik

Introduction

When deploying services in our homelab, they’re usually accessed through the insecure HTTP protocol, and this is particularly dangerous if we decide to expose them to the Internet.

We’ve already talked about Cloudflare and how it provides a secure point-to-point SSL tunnel to our internal network. Now we’re going to use Traefik to do two things: automatically assign an SSL certificate to any deployed Docker service (thus also having encription within your internal network) and providing a secure endpoint to each of them.

Also, we’re going to install Portainer to manage all of our Docker workloads.

Getting started

Watch this video and follow the transcribe instructions to get an idea of what we’re going to do:

I advise to watch the full video, but here are some key moments:

• 02:51 - What is Traefik?
• 06:18 - Traefik docker-compose.yml
• 13:01 - Deploy Portainer

Transcribed instructions: Link

Instructions

Prepare an entry-point VM

We’ll need an entry-point server that acts as both HTTP requests router and SSL provider (Traefik).

Make sure yo have a Domain name

Use Cloudflare as DNS provider

This will ease the process and secure connections even more

Install Traefik

I couldn’t make it work!

I don’t know if it’s because I’m using a Cloudflare Zero-Trust tunnel instead of assigning DNS records pointing towards my public IP, but either Traefik keeps responding with a 404 Page not found error or it fails due to too many redirections.

I’ll try it again following the official documentation.

There’s another guide here that could be useful.

Install Portainer

Portainer is a tool that eases the management and deployment of Docker containers in your infrastructure. Its installation is also pretty straightforward:

• For management purposes, we are going to create a docker folder in our home directory. This is where we’ll store all of our Docker services configurations:

mkdir docker
echo $PWD
# This should return the following

TODO

Pending to install Portainer and control all Docker hosts