SSL termination

dockercloud/haproxy supports ssl termination on multiple certificates. For each application that you want ssl terminates, simply set SSL_CERT and VIRTUAL_HOST. HAProxy, then, reads the certificate from the link environment and sets the ssl termination up.

Attention: there was a bug that if an environment variable value contains "=", which is common in the SSL_CERT, docker skips that environment variable. As a result, multiple ssl termination only works on docker 1.7.0 or higher, or in Docker Cloud.

SSL termination is enabled when:

1. at least one SSL certificate is set, and
2. either VIRTUAL_HOST is not set, or it is set with "https" as the scheme.

To set SSL certificate, you can either:

1. set DEFAULT_SSL_CERT in dockercloud/haproxy, or
2. set SSL_CERT and/or DEFAULT_SSL_CERT in the application services linked to HAProxy

The difference between SSL_CERT and DEFAULT_SSL_CERT is that, the multiple certificates specified by SSL_CERT are stored in as cert1.pem, cert2.pem, ..., whereas the one specified by DEFAULT_SSL_CERT is always stored as cert0.pem. In that case, HAProxy will use cert0.pem as the default certificate when there is no SNI match. However, when multiple DEFAULT_SSL_CERTIFICATE is provided, only one of the certificates can be stored as cert0.pem, others are discarded.

PEM Files

The certificate specified in dockercloud/haproxy or in the linked application services is a pem file, containing a private key followed by a public certificate(private key must be put before the public certificate and any extra Authority certificates, order matters). You can run the following script to generate a self-signed certificate:

openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout key.pem -out ca.pem -days 1080 -nodes -subj '/CN=*/O=My Company Name LTD./C=US'
cp key.pem cert.pem
cat ca.pem >> cert.pem

Once you have the pem file, you can run this command to convert the file correctly to one line:

awk 1 ORS='\\n' cert.pem

Copy the output and set it as the value of SSL_CERT or DEFAULT_SSL_CERT.