What is Traefik?

Traefik is an open-source Application Proxy that makes publishing your services a fun and easy experience. It receives requests on behalf of your system, identifies which components are responsible for handling them, and routes them securely.

What sets Traefik apart, besides its many features, is that it automatically discovers the right configuration for your services. The magic happens when Traefik inspects your infrastructure, where it finds relevant information and discovers which service serves which request.

Traefik is natively compliant with every major cluster technology, such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, AWS, and the list goes on; and can handle many at the same time. (It even works for legacy software running on bare metal.)

With Traefik, there is no need to maintain and synchronize a separate configuration file: everything happens automatically, in real time (no restarts, no connection interruptions). With Traefik, you spend time developing and deploying new features to your system, not on configuring and maintaining its working state.

And if your needs change, you can add API gateway and API management capabilities seamlessly to your existing Traefik deployments. It takes less than a minute, there’s no rip-and-replace, and all your configurations are preserved. See this in action in our API gateway demo video.

From the Traefik Maintainer Team

When developing Traefik, our main goal is to make it easy to use, and we're sure you'll enjoy it.

Personas

Traefik supports different needs depending on your background. We keep three user personas in mind as we build and organize these docs:

• Beginners: You are new to Traefik or new to reverse proxies. You want simple, guided steps to set things up without diving too deep into advanced topics.
• DevOps Engineers: You manage infrastructure or clusters (Docker, Kubernetes, or other orchestrators). You integrate Traefik into your environment and value reliability, performance, and streamlined deployments.
• Developers: You create and deploy applications or APIs. You focus on how to expose your services through Traefik, apply routing rules, and integrate it with your development workflow.

Core Concepts

Traefik’s main concepts help you understand how requests flow to your services:

• Entrypoints are the network entry points into Traefik. They define the port that will receive the packets and whether to listen for TCP or UDP.
• Routers are in charge of connecting incoming requests to the services that can handle them. In the process, routers may use pieces of middleware to update the request or act before forwarding the request to the service.
• Services are responsible for configuring how to reach the actual services that will eventually handle the incoming requests.
• Providers are infrastructure components, whether orchestrators, container engines, cloud providers, or key-value stores. The idea is that Traefik queries the provider APIs in order to find relevant information about routing, and when Traefik detects a change, it dynamically updates the routes.

These concepts work together to manage your traffic from the moment a request arrives until it reaches your application.

How to Use the Documentation

• Navigation: Each main section focuses on a specific stage of working with Traefik - installing, exposing services, observing, extending & migrating. Use the sidebar to navigate to the section that is most appropriate for your needs.
• Practical Examples: You will see code snippets and configuration examples for different environments (YAML/TOML, Labels, & Tags).
• Reference: When you need to look up technical details, our reference section provides a deep dive into configuration options and key terms.

Info

Have a question? Join our Community Forum to discuss, learn, and connect with the Traefik community.

Using Traefik OSS in Production? Consider our enterprise-grade API Gateway or our 24/7/365 OSS Support.

Explore our API Gateway upgrade via this short demo video.