Nginx – How to proxy requests to an internal server using nginx

nginxPROXYreverse-proxy

I have setup a web server to view my repositories (a Gitalist instance) on http://localhost:3000 and I want to setup a proxy using nginx.

I want that the request is proxied to my repository view when receiving a URI like DOMAIN/git/.

My current nginx configuration has been declared as follows:

location /git {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/;
}

The requests do get proxied to the server but none of the images/links or css can be resolved as they point to "http://localhost:3000/logo.png" for example.

EDIT

If I proxy_pass to the actual server address it does work:

 location /git {
        proxy_pass              http://192.168.1.111:3000/;
 }

But there should be a way of hiding the actual servers address while proxying.

Best Answer

In the case URIs are absolute, a solution could be using the Nginx HTTPSubModule or switching to Apache with its mod_proxy_html module. They are both able to modify the response received from backend servers and make some replacements.

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

Nginx – Proxy HTTPS requests to a HTTP backend with NGINX

The type of proxy you are trying to set up is called a reverse proxy. A quick search for reverse proxy nginx got me this page:

http://intranation.com/entries/2008/09/using-nginx-reverse-proxy/

In addition to adding some useful features like an X-Forwarded-For header (which will give your app visibility into the actual source IP), it specifically does:

proxy_redirect off

Good luck! :)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Nginx – In Nginx, how can I rewrite all http requests to https while maintaining sub-domain

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Nginx – Proxy HTTPS requests to a HTTP backend with NGINX

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