Traefik

Traefik Is the Cloud-Native Reverse Proxy That Routes Itself

Tired of hand-editing config files every time a container appears or disappears? Traefik is the open-source edge router that watches your infrastructure and wires up routes automatically — no reloads, no downtime, no manual intervention.

What it is
Traefik is an open-source cloud-native application proxy (MIT) written in Go that sits at the edge of your network and reverse-proxies traffic to your backend services. Unlike a traditional static proxy, it integrates directly with your orchestrator or service registry — Docker, Kubernetes, Swarm, Consul, Etcd, Rancher, ECS, and more — and dynamically generates routes the moment services come online.

Why it stands out
Automatic service discovery — Traefik listens to your infrastructure API and instantly creates routes; no manual config edits or reloads required.
Built-in HTTPS — native Let's Encrypt / ACME support obtains and renews TLS certificates automatically, so encrypted traffic is the default, not an afterthought.
Rich middleware ecosystem — rate limiting, circuit breakers, basic and forward auth, header manipulation, redirects, retries, and more, all composable and declarative.
Multi-protocol — handles HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, and UDP, with flexible load-balancing strategies (round-robin, least connections, IP hash).
Observability out of the box — Prometheus, Datadog, StatsD, and InfluxDB metrics, plus structured access logs and a live dashboard that surfaces active routers, services, and middlewares.
Plugin system — extend Traefik with custom middleware written in Go, loaded dynamically at runtime.
Production-hardened — widely adopted, actively maintained, and ready for multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem deployments.

Get started
Pull the Docker image (traefik/traefik) or grab a binary from github.com/traefik/traefik.
Point it at your orchestrator (Docker socket, Kube-apiserver, Consul API, etc.) and define entrypoints.
Tag your services with Traefik labels (Docker) or Ingress resources (Kubernetes) and watch routes appear live.
Enable the dashboard on a dedicated port for visibility; wire up a metrics exporter if you run observability tooling.

If you're already self-hosting a Docker stack or running Kubernetes and want routing that keeps up with your deployment cadence, Traefik cuts out the manual proxy patching and lets you focus on the services.

🔗 github.com/traefik/traefik

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