About mdns-proxy

mDNS backed reverse proxy solution for home labs

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akamensky

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README.md

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mDNS-Proxy service

Overview

A service that discovers applications running on Docker, then publishes their name as another hostname on mDNS and sets up a reverse proxy. This is a simple enough solution for many home labs that allow forgetting about different ports.

It currently has some limitations:

Since mDNS is a multicast, if it is running in the container then it should be using the host network (any other solution is overcomplicating it IMO).
Since it discovers applications on Docker, it needs docker Unix socket accessible to it, so it needs to be either mounted in container, or be running as root as a user who is a member of docker group.
For a quick solution it uses github.com/pion/mdns/v2, which currently does not allow adding/removing published names without restarting the server, this means that every time new name added (or one removed) the mDNS server will be restarted, which may cause brief interruptions (contributions to change this are welcome)

Install

With Docker

In your compose file add a service as such:

  mdns-proxy:
    image: "ghcr.io/akamensky/mdns-proxy:latest"
    container_name: "mdns-proxy"
    network_mode: "host"
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro"

Without Docker

You will need Go 1.23 or newer

git clone https://github.com/akamensky/mdns-proxy.git
cd mdns-proxy
go build .
Use produced binary

Usage

For each application that you want to be accessible on local network via mDNS add following labels in compose (or similar via CLI):

    labels:
      - "mdns-proxy.enable=true"
      - "mdns-proxy.name=servicename"
      - "mdns-proxy.address=https://127.0.0.1:8999"

This assumes that the application is exposed to 127.0.0.1 only and 8999 is the port it exposes on the host machine
With that the service will be available over mDNS as servicename.local and it will be proxied according to that name

Configuration

$ ./mdns-proxy -h
  -listenAddr string
        Specify the address to listen on (default "0.0.0.0:80")
  -localSuffix string
        Specify the local suffix used for mDNS network (default "local")

License

See LICENSE file.

mdns-proxy