How to control the backend traffic of web application we serve using Nginx

This is a simple application that uses Nginx as a load balancer to control traffic comming from the client to node.js backend servers

To get started with this project you need to have docker installed on your system

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/OpenTechConsult/loadbalance-nodejs-nginx-1.git

2. Navigate to the project directory

cd loadbalance-nodejs-nginx-1

3. Navigate to the server directory

cd server

4. build the image

docker built -t server .

5. create a network for all the future running containers to share.

docker network create loadbalance_net

6. run 4 containers as follow

docker run -p 1010:5050 --name backend_server_1 -d --network loadbalance_net server

docker run -p 2020:5050 --name backend_server_2 -d --network loadbalance_net server

docker run -p 3030:5050 --name backend_server_3 -d --network loadbalance_net server

docker run -p 4040:5050 --name backend_server_4 -d --network loadbalance_net server

7. After that cd into the nginx folder

cd nginx

8. Build the image inside the docker file

docker build -t nginx_load_balancer .

9. run the nginx container

docker run -p 3000:80 --name nginx_server -d --network loadbalance_net nginx_load_balancer

10. You can the test our loadbalanced application by sending a request to http://localhost:3000

We will get a response saying

This is the server's response