First deploy

The goal

Deploy a small app behind HTTPS with a public domain. We will use whoami — a tiny container that prints request metadata, perfect for verifying the reverse proxy.

Steps

1. Open the Pier dashboard and click Add service → From Docker image.
2. Enter image traefik/whoami:latest.
3. Give it a name — e.g. whoami.
4. Attach a domain you control (e.g. demo.example.com). Make sure the DNS A record points at your server IP.
5. Click Deploy.

Pier will:

• Pull the image.
• Create the container and attach it to the pier-net Docker network.
• Allocate an internal port.
• Generate a Traefik router rule for your domain.
• Request a Let’s Encrypt certificate.

After 10–30 seconds (first cert issuance is the slow step), https://demo.example.com serves the app.

Verify

curl https://demo.example.com

You should see request headers printed by whoami.

What just happened

• Pier wrote a Traefik dynamic-config file mapping demo.example.com → the service’s internal port.
• Traefik detected the file, issued an ACME cert, and is now terminating TLS at the edge.
• The container itself binds only to the internal Docker network — it is not exposed to the internet directly.

Next

• Learn how reverse proxy + SSL works.
• Deploy something real from the service catalog.
• Wire up Git-to-deploy from a repo.