TCP Middlewares Overview

Overview of all available TCP middlewares in Traefik Proxy for controlling TCP connections.

TCP Middlewares

Controlling TCP Connections

Configuration Example

Docker & Swarm

# As a Docker Label
whoami:
  image: traefik/whoami
  labels:
    # Create a middleware named `foo-ip-allowlist`
    - "traefik.tcp.middlewares.foo-ip-allowlist.ipallowlist.sourcerange=127.0.0.1/32, 192.168.1.7"
    # Apply the middleware named `foo-ip-allowlist` to the router named `router1`
    - "traefik.tcp.routers.router1.middlewares=foo-ip-allowlist@docker"

Available TCP Middlewares

Middleware	Purpose	Area
InFlightConn	Limits simultaneous connections	Security, Request lifecycle
IPAllowList	Limit allowed client IPs	Security, Request lifecycle

TCP vs HTTP Middlewares

TCP middlewares operate at the transport layer (Layer 4) and have different capabilities compared to HTTP middlewares:

• TCP middlewares work with raw TCP connections
• HTTP middlewares can inspect and modify HTTP requests/responses

TCP middlewares cannot inspect HTTP-specific data like headers, methods, or paths. For HTTP traffic, use HTTP middlewares instead.