Traefik on Luis Sousa Blog

Fixing 'Robots.txt Unreachable' in Google Search Console with Traefik and Docker

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000

We run a travel blog (joyofexploringtheworld.com) on Docker Compose with Traefik v3 and Cloudflare. One morning Google Search Console showed every page blocked from indexing with “Failed: Robots.txt unreachable”. The site was working fine in a browser, so what was going on?

Two separate issues were conspiring to break Googlebot’s ability to fetch /robots.txt. Here’s what we found and how we fixed both.

The setup Link to heading

Our WordPress service sits on two Docker networks: app-network (shared with Traefik, Redis, imgproxy) and db-network (shared with MariaDB). We run two scaled WordPress containers behind Traefik’s load balancer.

Rank Math sitemap not loading with Traefik (and how to fix it)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000

We run a travel blog (joyofexploringtheworld.com) on a budget VPS with Docker Compose, Cloudflare, and Traefik. When we added Rank Math for SEO, the sitemap worked in the admin but returned 404 on the public URL. Here’s what was going on and how we fixed it.

The problem Link to heading

Rank Math generates sitemaps at runtime via index.php?sitemap=1. On Apache or Nginx with .htaccess/rewrite rules, the pretty URL /sitemap_index.xml gets routed to WordPress automatically. With Traefik, that routing doesn’t exist by default—Traefik doesn’t use .htaccess, so /sitemap_index.xml never reaches WordPress and you get a 404.

Why Our Site Went Down for an Hour (And What We Fixed)

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000

We run a travel blog (joyofexploringtheworld.com) that helps people plan itineraries—hosted on a low-cost VPS with Docker Compose and Cloudflare. One small performance tweak took the whole site offline for an hour. Here’s what happened and how we fixed it.

What Went Wrong Link to heading

We added a Traefik compression middleware to speed up responses. The new config lived in a separate YAML file. Traefik was configured to load only a single file (e.g. real-ip.yaml), not the whole directory. The router referenced compress@file, but that file was never loaded. Every request failed.

Running a WordPress Travel Blog on a Budget VPS: The Full Docker Stack

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

We run joyofexploringtheworld.com — a travel blog — on a single 24 GB VPS using Docker Compose and free-tier Cloudflare. No managed WordPress hosting, no premium plugins, no surprise invoices. Here is the full stack, laid out so you can steal whatever is useful.

Architecture overview Link to heading

The request path looks like this:

Internet
  -> Cloudflare (CDN / APO / edge SSL)
    -> Traefik v3 (reverse proxy, TLS termination for origin)
      -> 2 WordPress containers (round-robin with sticky session cookies)
        -> MariaDB 11 (single-writer database)
        -> Redis (persistent object cache)

Alongside the main request path we run a handful of supporting services: imgproxy on a dedicated subdomain for on-the-fly image resizing and format conversion, a wp-cron sidecar that hits wp-cron.php every five minutes so we can disable the default front-end cron, an automated backup container that dumps the database and syncs uploads to Hetzner Storage Box nightly, and the Datadog agent for logs, traces, and container metrics.