---
title: HTTP routing with Traefik
description: &desc Use Traefik to easily route traffic between multiple containers or non-containerized workloads
keywords: traefik, container-supported development
linktitle: HTTP routing with Traefik
summary: *desc
tags: [networking]
params:
  time: 20 minutes
---

## Introduction

During local development, it’s quite common to need to run multiple HTTP services. You might have both an API and a frontend app, a WireMock service to mock data endpoints, or a database visualizer (such as phpMyAdmin or pgAdmin). In many development setups, these services are exposed on different ports, which then requires you to remember what’s on what port but can also introduce other problems (such as CORS).

A reverse proxy can dramatically simplify this setup by being the single exposed service and then routing requests to the appropriate service based on the request URL (either by path or hostname). [Traefik](https://traefik.io/traefik/) is a modern, cloud-native reverse proxy and load balancer that makes developing and deploying multi-service applications easier. This guide will show you how to use Traefik with Docker to enhance your development environment.

In this guide, you will learn how to:

1. Start Traefik with Docker
2. Configure routing rules to split traffic between two containers
3. Use Traefik in a containerized development environment
4. Use Traefik to send requests to non-containerized workloads

## Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required to follow along with this how-to guide:

- [Docker Desktop](https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/)
- [Node.js](https://nodejs.org/en/download/package-manager) and [yarn](https://yarnpkg.com/)
- Basic of Docker

## Using Traefik with Docker

One of the unique features of Traefik is its ability to be configured in many ways. When using the Docker provider, Traefik gets its configuration from other running containers using [labels](https://docs.docker.com/config/labels-custom-metadata/). Traefik will watch engine events (for container starts and stops), extract the labels, and update its configuration.

While there are [many Traefik-monitored labels](https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/routing/providers/docker/), the two most common will be:

- `traefik.http.routers.<service-name>.rule` - used to indicate the routing rule ([view all of the available rules here](https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/routing/routers/#rule))
- `traefik.http.services.<service-name>.loadbalancer.server.port` - indicates the port Traefik should forward the request to. Note that this container port does not need to be exposed on your host machine ([read about port detection here](https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/providers/docker/#port-detection))

Let’s do a quick demo of starting Traefik and then configuring two additional containers to be accessible using different hostnames.

1. In order for two containers to be able to communicate with each other, they need to be on the same network. Create a network named `traefik-demo` using the `docker network create` command:

   ```console
   $ docker network create traefik-demo
   ```

2. Start a Traefik container using the following command. The command exposes Traefik on port 80, mounts the Docker socket (which is used to monitor containers to update configuration), and passes the `--providers.docker` argument to configure Traefik to use the Docker provider.

   ```console
   $ docker run -d --network=traefik-demo -p 80:80 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock traefik:v3.1.2 --providers.docker
   ```

3. Now, start a simple Nginx container and define the labels Traefik is watching for to configure the HTTP routing. Note that the Nginx container is not exposing any ports.

   ```console
   $ docker run -d --network=traefik-demo --label 'traefik.http.routers.nginx.rule=Host(`nginx.localhost`)' nginx
   ```

   Once the container starts, open your browser to [http://nginx.localhost](http://nginx.localhost) to see the app (all Chromium-based browsers route \*.localhost requests locally with no additional setup).