I’ve been trying to migrate my services over to rootless Podman containers for a while now and I keep running into weird issues that always make me go back to rootful. This past weekend I almost had it all working until I realized that my reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager) wasn’t passing the real source IP of client requests down to my other containers. This meant that all my containers were seeing requests coming solely from the IP address of the reverse proxy container, which breaks things like Nextcloud brute force protection, etc. It’s apparently due to this Podman bug: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/8193
This is the last step before I can finally switch to rootless, so it makes me wonder what all you self-hosters out there are doing with your rootless setups. I can’t be the only one running into this issue right?
If anyone’s curious, my setup consists of several docker-compose files, each handling a different service. Each service has its own dedicated Podman network, but only the proxy container connects to all of them to serve outside requests. This way each service is separated from each other and the only ingress from the outside is via the proxy container. I can also easily have duplicate instances of the same service without having to worry about port collisions, etc. Not being able to see real client IP really sucks in this situation.
I’ve solved this on my side with socket activation, which besides giving out the real IP, also has native network performance since it fully skips slirp4netns. You could even set nginx’s network to none, but since I also use named networks for internal container DNS, so I kept network set.
I’ve built my own Nginx image and I’m using Quadlets instead of Compose, so my config is as easy as it gets, the socket file is something like this:
And the quadlet file for NGINX goes like this for me:
[Unit]
Description=Web serving, reverse proxying, caching, load balancing, media streaming, and more.
Requires=nginx.socket
After=nginx.socket
[Container]
Image=localhost/nginx:latest
AutoUpdate=local
Volume=/data/containers/nginx/conf.d:/etc/nginx/conf.d:Z
Volume=/data/containers/nginx/certs:/certs:Z
Network=services.network
# Socket for systemd
Environment="NGINX=3;"
[Service]
Restart=always
If you check the socket activation link, there are a few other examples, but IMO that’s the easiest setup out of the 5 examples. You could move NGINX out of the compose setup for easiness or adapt examples 3 to 6 (which invoke podman manually). That said, I wanted to use Caddy for easier certificate management, but it doesn’t support socket activation, so this setup kinda hardlocked me to NGINX.
I see! So I am assuming you had to configure Nginx specifically to support this? Problem is I love using Nginx Proxy Manager and I am not sure how to change that to use socket activation. Thanks for the info though!
Man, I often wonder whether I should ditch docker-compose. Problem is there’s just so many compose files out there and its super convenient to use those instead of converting them into systemd unit files every time.
Not really, in theory all you need is that environment flag to set the socket up. I would guess it would work with NPM if it respects it. I ended up with a custom built image originally to fix nameserver detection with named networks in Podman, and then expanded it with some sane defaults.
I do enjoy administering my containers through systemd but it’s indeed an inconvenience if you want a more straightforward solution. Arguably using rootless Podman is already a major inconvenience, since you always hit some quirk or need to patch something up because images assume rootful Docker, so I don’t mind going an extra mile to have everything set up as quadlets. I do consider using LXC every now and then for certain things just to make it easier in the long run, as matter of fact, I’m still pondering if I shouldn’t just create an unprivileged LXC container for the reverse proxy instead of dealing with this (although it has been working mostly great so far).
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I’ve solved this on my side with socket activation, which besides giving out the real IP, also has native network performance since it fully skips slirp4netns. You could even set nginx’s network to none, but since I also use named networks for internal container DNS, so I kept network set.
I’ve built my own Nginx image and I’m using Quadlets instead of Compose, so my config is as easy as it gets, the socket file is something like this:
And the quadlet file for NGINX goes like this for me:
If you check the socket activation link, there are a few other examples, but IMO that’s the easiest setup out of the 5 examples. You could move NGINX out of the compose setup for easiness or adapt examples 3 to 6 (which invoke podman manually). That said, I wanted to use Caddy for easier certificate management, but it doesn’t support socket activation, so this setup kinda hardlocked me to NGINX.
Damn. This looked like such a promising solution.
I see! So I am assuming you had to configure Nginx specifically to support this? Problem is I love using Nginx Proxy Manager and I am not sure how to change that to use socket activation. Thanks for the info though!
Man, I often wonder whether I should ditch docker-compose. Problem is there’s just so many compose files out there and its super convenient to use those instead of converting them into systemd unit files every time.
Not really, in theory all you need is that environment flag to set the socket up. I would guess it would work with NPM if it respects it. I ended up with a custom built image originally to fix nameserver detection with named networks in Podman, and then expanded it with some sane defaults.
I do enjoy administering my containers through systemd but it’s indeed an inconvenience if you want a more straightforward solution. Arguably using rootless Podman is already a major inconvenience, since you always hit some quirk or need to patch something up because images assume rootful Docker, so I don’t mind going an extra mile to have everything set up as quadlets. I do consider using LXC every now and then for certain things just to make it easier in the long run, as matter of fact, I’m still pondering if I shouldn’t just create an unprivileged LXC container for the reverse proxy instead of dealing with this (although it has been working mostly great so far).