nginx-templating

An NGINX Docker image supporting templating through environment variables.

What does it do?

This module searches through all all *.template files within the /templates directory and formats them at startup using all of the available environment variables.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name a.${SERVER_DOMAIN};

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://${SERVER_PROXY_TARGET}/example;
    }
}

In this example, the environment variable SERVER_DOMAIN is used to set the host to which this server will respond, while the variable SERVER_PROXY_TARGET decides the target.

Example usage

Templates are included in the image upon building. This means that one way to feed new templates is to just include them inside the templates folder and building the image.

This will however require re-building the image each time a template is changed. To avoid this, you may create a read-only volume to the /templates directory, as the template complation is done at image startup.

An example involving Docker Compose may look like:

services:
  nginx:
    image: nginx-templated:latest
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 80:80
    volumes:
      - ./templates:/templates:ro
    environment:
      - SERVER_DOMAIN=localhost
      - SERVER_PROXY_TARGET=1.1.1.1