Nginx https rewrite turns POST to GET

nginxrewrite

My proxy server runs on ip A and this is how people access my web service. The nginx configuration will redirect to a virtual machine on ip B.

For the proxy server on IP A, I have this in my sites-available

server {
        listen 443;
        ssl on;
        ssl_certificate nginx.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key nginx.key;

        client_max_body_size 200M;
        server_name localhost 127.0.0.1;
        server_name_in_redirect off;

        location / {
                proxy_pass http://10.10.0.59:80;
                proxy_redirect http://10.10.0.59:80/ /;

                proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        }

}

server {
        listen 80;
        rewrite     ^(.*)   https://$http_host$1 permanent;
        server_name localhost 127.0.0.1;
        server_name_in_redirect off;
        location / {
                proxy_pass http://10.10.0.59:80;
                proxy_redirect http://10.10.0.59:80/ /;
                proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        }
}

The proxy_redirect was taken from how do I get nginx to forward HTTP POST requests via rewrite?

Everything that hits the public IP will hit 443 because of the rewrite. Internally, we are forwarding to 80 on the virtual machine.

But when I run a python script such as the one below to test our configuration

import requests

data = {'username': '....', 'password': '.....'}
url = 'http://IP_A/api/service/signup'

res  = requests.post(url, data=data, verify=False)
print res
print res.json
print res.status_code
print res.headers

I am getting a 405 Method Not Allowed. In nginx we found that when it hit the internal server, the internal nginx was getting a GET request, even though in the original header we did a POST (this was shown in the Python script).

So it seems like rewrite has problem. Any idea how to fix this? When I commented out the rewrite, it hits 80 for sure, and it went through. Since rewrite was able to talk to our internal server, so rewrite itself has no issue. It's just the rewrite dropped POST to GET.

Thank you!

(This will also be asked on Nginx forum because this is a critical blocker…)

Best Answer

It's not Nginx, it's your browser.

Note from RFC2616:

RFC 1945 and RFC 2068 specify that the client is not allowed to change the method on the redirected request. However, most existing user agent implementations treat 302 as if it were a 303 response, performing a GET on the Location [..]

This is true for all popular browsers and there is nothing you can do about it.