How ports and https are handled for Docker deploy

1

I have a Dockerfile with a simple dotnet based http api endpoint. When I deployed it, it just worked! :sweat_smile: Even with https redirects! That’s great! But there are a few things I don’t understand. :flushed:

  • I never exposed or mapped any ports from the container in the setup. Is there something happening there by default? Is there a default 80:80 mapping when running the container?

  • When an incoming request is received over http that’s redirected to https and 443 by Render. But is that then again mapped over to the 80 port of my container? Is there never a case where the container itself should be exposed on the 443 port of the container host?

2

Good questions!

When you deploy a web service, including those that use custom Dockerfiles, Render does port detection to figure out where it should forward incoming traffic for your service. If you’re using a particular port, you can speed up port detection by setting a PORT environment variable, but this isn’t necessary. You don’t ever need to expose port 443 or even port 80 for that matter. Render will find the open port where your server is listening for HTTP traffic.

As you picked up on, all requests to Render services go over HTTPS. HTTP requests are redirected to HTTPS, our load balancer terminates TLS for your service, and requests are forwarded on to your HTTP service inside a private network.

In other words, you can just serve everything over HTTP using whatever port you like and Render automatically encrypts all traffic.

4 Likes
4

Thanks David! Great solution! :ok_hand:As I said, it just worked, first try for me.

A bit more documentation would save you some stupid questions though :wink:

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5

@riha These were smart questions! And good call on documentation. We’re in the process of expanding our docs.

6

Hello David,

Is there any way to force Render to pick another port?

I’m using the Hasura image hasura/graphql-engine:v1.3.3.cli-migrations-v2 which is opening two ports during its startup phase, and Render is picking the wrong one (9691 instead of 8080).

7

You can tell Render which port to use by defining the PORT environment variable.

8

I figured it out, and it works! Thanks a lot. :smile:

1 Like
9

I’m having a similar problem. After the suggestions here, I fixed it, but autodetection is a little slow.

Perhaps a silly question, but if I want to do this in YAML, would I do it for this specific service? IE:

services:
 - type: web
    name: foo
    ... other bits and bobs ...
    envVars:
      - key: PORT
        value: 4242