Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

original post on github

a blog post series to my homelab

Part One

In this blog post, I will start by walking you through the process of setting up Traefik as a reverse proxy for your homelab. My setup involves using a virtual machine connected via a point-to-point VPN to a cloud VPS, along with several Docker containers on my homelab for various tasks and learning purposes. The goal is to expose only Traefik to the internet, which will then provide access to my internal homelab. For certain applications, I also use Tailscale, which I prefer not to expose directly to the internet. In short, I have a complex internal homelab setup, and in this post, we’ll simplify it!

I’ve made a short video to accompany this blog post:

docker compose

To begin, we need to set up a basic Docker Compose YAML file.

As of the time of writing this blog post, the latest Traefik Docker container image is version 3.3. It is best to declare a specific version instead of using “latest” tag.

image: traefik:v3.3

Using an .env file in a Docker Compose configuration is important for several reasons, as for configure variables, secrets and it is easy to reuse though several services and to avoid hardcoding values. For traefik is important so we can configure the docker GID in order traefil to be able to use the docker socket.

eg. .env

# This is my user id
PUID=1001
# This is my docker group id
PGID=142
UMASK="002"
TZ="Europe/Athens"
DNS="88.198.92.222"

Next interesting topic is the volumes section.

I would like to mount a local directory for the traefik configuration, which I will later use with the dynamic file provider. Additionally, to enable Traefik to recongize our (future) docker images, we need to mount the docker socket too.

    volumes:
      - ./traefik:/etc/traefik
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

to conclude, here is a very basic docker compose yaml file:

docker-compose.yml

---
services:
  traefik:
    image: traefik:v3.3
    container_name: traefik
    hostname: traefik
    env_file:
      - path: ./.env
        required: true
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      # The Web UI (enabled by --api.insecure=true)
      - 8080:8080
      # The HTTP port
      - 80:80
    volumes:
      - ./traefik:/etc/traefik
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

pull traefik docker image

we can explicitly get the Traefik docker container image

docker compose pull traefik

traefik configuration file

we also need to create the configuration file by enabling the API and the dashboard for now.

Create the directory and file

traefik/traefik.yml

and write this:

# API and dashboard configuration
api:
  insecure: true

Start traefik docker

We are ready start and run our Traefik docker container:

docker compose up

result is something like:

[+] Running 2/2
 ✔ Network homelab_default  Created       0.3s
 ✔ Container traefik        Created       0.4s
Attaching to traefik

To stop traefik from docker compose, we need to open a new terminal and type from the same directory

docker compose down

or, we ca run the docker compose and detach it so it runs on the background:

docker compose up traefik -d

This is going to be useful for the future as we starting each service one by one.

Test traefik

Open your browser and click on: http://127.0.0.1:8080

you will see something like: