Multi Tenant Node-RED Docker Compose

A collection of Docker container that will implement a Multi Tenant Node-RED environment.

Download

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/hardillb/multi-tenant-node-red.git

Pre-reqs

Run the setup.sh script to create the required directories and set the right ownership/permissions.

If run with no arguments setup.sh will default to using the current machine's hostname with .local appended as it's root domain, otherwise it will take the first argument as the root domain. e.g.

$ ./setup.sh example.com

And if you are running on a Docker Swarm deployment you will need to build the management app and the catalogue containers manually with.

$ docker build -t manager ./manager
$ docker build -t catalogue ./catalogue

When running on a AMD64 based host everything should be fine, if you want to run on ARM64 then you will need to rebuild the verdaccio/verdaccio and nginx-proxy containers as they only ship AMD64 versions.

Until this pull-request is merged into nginx-proxy you will have to manually build forego and dockergen since the container directly downloads a pre-built AMD64 bit binaries.

Configure

DNS

The VIRTUAL_HOST and ROOT_DOMAIN entries at the end of the docker-compose file will have been updated by the setup.sh script, you will want to set up a wildcard DNS entry that points to the host machine.

e.g. if you use a ROOT_DOMAIN of example.com then you should set up a DNS entry for *.example.com that points to the docker host.

For testing you can edit your local /etc/hosts file to point to the manager and application instances, eg:

192.168.1.100   manager.example.com  r1.example.com  r2.example.com

Where 192.168.1.100 is the IP address of the Docker host.

Avahi

If you are running this on a small local lan then you may not have a DNS server to add the wildcard entry to, in this case you can use the hardillb/nginx-proxy-avahi-helper container which will add mDNS CNAMES to the docker host machine (assuming it's running the Avahi daemon) so you will be able to use a .local virtual domain to access Node-RED instances.

You can run the hardillb/nginx-proxy-avahi-helper with the following command

docker run -d -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock -v /run/dbus/system_bus_socket:/run/dbus/system_bus_socket hardillb/nginx-proxy-avahi-helper

If you see AppArmor errors in the logs for this container then you need to add the --priviledged option to the command line.

HTTPS

There are 3 options for setting up HTTPS support.

• Set up a single wildcard certificate to match the wildcard DNS entry, this means you only have to manage a single certificate for all Node-RED instances. The certificate/key pair for example.com should be named example.com.crt and example.com.key and placed in the certs directory. Uncomment the line in the volumes section of the nginx service in docker-compose.yml

• Add a certificate and key per instance to the certs directory with names matching the VIRTUAL_HOST entry e.g. for an instance named foo, foo.example.com.crt and foo.example.com.key

• Use something like nginx-proxy/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion which will generate a LetsEncrypt certificate for each instance (as well and renewing it when needed).

For both you will need to uncomment the - "443:443" line in the ports section of the nginx service in docker-compose.yml.

You can check out more details here

Private Node Repository

npm

The npm repository is available on port 4873 of the Docker host. You can publish new nodes to this repo under the scope of @private using the username admin and the password password

To add the scope to your local npm config run the following:

npm login --registry=http://example.com:4873 --scope=@private

Once this is setup you can publish any package with the scope @private to that repository with the normal npm publish command

You can access the web front end for the repository on port 4873 of the docker host (you can map this to a custom domain and port 80 by adding a VIRTUAL_HOST environment variable to the registry entry in the docker_compose.yml file)

Catalogue

You can edit the catalogue.json file in the catalogue directory as required using the build-catalogue.js in the manager directory.

node build-catalogue.js example.com [keyword filter] > ../catalogue/catalogue.json

Where the first argument is the hostname of the docker host and [keyword filter] (defaults to node-red) is the name of the keyword to filter the entries in the repository on.

Start

To start up the stack run

docker-compose up -d

Manager

You can access the instance manager web app on http://manager.example.com

Instances

If you create an instance with the app name of r1 then you would access that instance on http://r1.example.com and so on.