Coexistence of UCP and HTTP server on Docker

Question

I have a Docker EE running on a Host with IP 172.10.100.17. I have installed UCP using the default parameters and I have also deployed nginx container with host port 443 mapped to 443 on the container.

docker run -it --rm --name ucp -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock docker/ucp install --host-address 172.10.100.17 --interactive  
docker run -it -d --name ngx -p 80:80 -p 443:443 nginx

1. Can UCP and Nginx co-exist with both serving at https://172.10.100.17?
2. What is the best practice for deploying UCP when my primary goal is to have nginx/apache serving on Host IP?
3. Would it be recommended to set a static IP to nginx container/service?

(Note:https is enabled on nginx)

Answer 1

The key is in the -p parameter, which handles port mapping. The first port listed is on the host, and the second is in the container. So -p 80:80 means to map port 80 on the host to port 80 in the container.

Let’s expand this to Nginx. I’m going to assume you want to use HTTPS with both UCP and Nginx. Only one application can listen per port on a host. So, if two containers both expose port 443, you can have one use port 443 on the host (-p 443:443) and the other use a different port (-p 4443:443). Then you’ll access them at ports 443 and 4443 on the host, respectively, even though both containers expose port 443 - Docker is doing the port forwarding.

It may be that you’re asking how to run both containers on a single port using Nginx as a reverse proxy. That’s a possibility as well, though more complex.