Running shiny app through nginx and letsencrypt ssl using docker

Question

I would like to run my app (myapp) on my domain (www.myapp.com) through nginx reverse proxy and letsencrypt ssl using docker. Everything looks right, but I can't see my app running on my domain.

If I run my docker app without using the reverse proxy and SSL, I can see my app running on my domain.

I have done the following:

Running the proxy

$ cd
$ mkdir certs

$ docker run -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 \
    --name nginx-proxy \
    -v $HOME/certs:/etc/nginx/certs:ro \
    -v /etc/nginx/vhost.d \
    -v /usr/share/nginx/html \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro \
    --label com.github.jrcs.letsencrypt_nginx_proxy_companion.nginx_proxy=true \
    jwilder/nginx-proxy

Running the Let's Encrypt companion container:

$ docker run -d \
    --name nginx-letsencrypt \
    --volumes-from nginx-proxy \
    -v $HOME/certs:/etc/nginx/certs:rw \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
    jrcs/letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion

My app dockerfile:

# get shiny server and R from the rocker project
FROM rocker/shiny:4.0.5

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    sudo \
    gdebi-core \
    pandoc \
    pandoc-citeproc \
    libcurl4-gnutls-dev \
    libxt-dev \
    libssl-dev \
    libxml2 \
    libxml2-dev \
    libsodium-dev

# install R packages required 
# Change the packages list to suit your needs
RUN R -e "install.packages(c('shiny', 'shinythemes', 'dygraphs', 'shinyWidgets', 'manipulateWidget', 'DT', 'zoo', 'shinyjs','emayili', 'wordcloud2', 'rmarkdown', 'xts', 'shinyauthr', 'curl', 'jsonlite', 'httr'), repos='http://cran.rstudio.com/')"

# copy the app directory into the image
WORKDIR /srv/shiny-server/myapp/app
COPY app .

# run app
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["R", "-e", "shiny::runApp('/srv/shiny-server/myapp/app',  host = '0.0.0.0', port = 8080)"]

Finally, I have built and run my docker app:

$ cd /srv/shiny-server/myapp
$ sudo docker build -t myapp .

$ docker run -d \
    --name mysite \
    -e '[email protected]' \
    -e 'LETSENCRYPT_HOST=myapp.com' \
    -e 'VIRTUAL_HOST=myapp.com' myapp

Unfortunately, when I visit my domain, I see a page with the message:

http://myapp.com -> 502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.21.6

https://myapp.com -> 500 Internal Server Error nginx/1.21.6

I can't see my app running.

If I run the following, after running the nginx-proxy and nginx-letsencrypt containers,

$ docker run -d \
    --name nginx \
    -e '[email protected]' \
    -e 'LETSENCRYPT_HOST=myapp.com' \
    -e 'VIRTUAL_HOST=myapp.com' nginx

I can see:

http://myapp.com -> Welcome to nginx!

https://myapp.com -> 500 Internal Server Error nginx/1.21.6

If I just run the nginx-proxy and the nginx-letsencrypt containers, I get the following:

http://myapp.com -> 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable nginx

https://myapp.com -> 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable nginx

Right. To nginx works as reverse proxy you will need a vhost config. Error 500 on https access could be some failure with certificates. 503 error usually means that a reverse proxy is working but no reaching application. — Claudio Weiler
– Claudio Weiler, Commented Aug 9, 2022 at 18:09
Thanks. Nevertheless, I suppose the important errors here are 502 and 500. I get these errors when I run my docker app behind the proxy. Could you help me with this issue? Do I have the right ports? — Citizen
– Citizen, Commented Aug 9, 2022 at 18:23

akop · Accepted Answer · 2022-08-16 07:08:15Z

1

+50

Perhaps here are multiple problems.

Port
In your Dockerfile, you wrote EXPOSE 80 and after that you start shiny with port 8080.
You should write EXPOSE 8080 instead. When you start your app-container, then you might must specify VIRTUAL_PORT.
SSL Certs
I think, that nginx is not happy about the certs. A 500 always means, that there is a problem on server-side.
Have a look in the logs of nginx (docker logs nginx-proxy).
In general, I recommend to avoid dockerized certs (they are pretty complex and often cause erros). Have look at point 4 of my other answer: Can't enable ssl by docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion
Unused mounts
Maybe I am wrong, but I think that some volumes are not necessary. Like -v /etc/nginx/vhost.d.

Good luck.

answered Aug 16, 2022 at 7:08

akop

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1 Comment

Citizen Over a year ago

Excellent! It works! I have simply written EXPOSE 8080 in my dockerfile and I have added -e VIRTUAL_PORT=8080 to run my app. I guess EXPOSE is equal to port (in Shiny). There was also an error with my IPv6 and Let's Encrypt, so I deleted my AAAA records. I have also tried to address this issue with docker compose and two apps but it doesn't work. I would appreciate if you could answer my other question: stackoverflow.com/questions/73359253/…

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