Web-server – Proxy HTTP requests to servers on different ports, using subdomain

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Say I have a minimalist Python web server running with several instances, each with different ports specified as command line arguments.

I'd like requests to my server to be redirected like this, using the Host header:

name1.mydomain.com -> localhost:8000
name2.mydomain.com -> localhost:8001
name3.mydomain.com -> localhost:8002

Is this something best done with a server like Lighttpd and doing some virtualhost configuration – is that possible?

I'd prefer not to use something heavy weight like Apache.

Thanks!

Best Answer

With nginx you could use something like following:

server {
  server_name name1.domain.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
  }
}

server {
  server_name name2.domain.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8001;
  }
}

server {
  server_name name3.domain.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8002;
  }
}

BTW, there is another method to achieve same effect using map directive:

map $http_host  $port {
    hostnames;

    default               8000;
    name1.example.com     8000;
    name2.example.com     8001;
    name3.example.com     8002;
}

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name ~^name\d.example.com;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:$port;
    }
}

nginx.conf

#lets assume your IP address is 89.89.89.89 and also that you want nginx to listen on port 7000 and your app is running on port 3000

server {
    listen 7000 ssl;
 
    ssl_certificate /path/to/ssl_certificate.cer;
    ssl_certificate_key /path/to/ssl_certificate_key.key;
    ssl_client_certificate /path/to/ssl_client_certificate.cer;

    error_page 497 301 =307 https://89.89.89.89:7000$request_uri;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://89.89.89.89:3000/;

        proxy_pass_header Server;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Protocol $scheme;
    }
}

However if a client makes a request via any other method except a GET, that request will be turned into a GET. Thus to preserve the request method that the client came in via; we use error processing redirects as shown in nginx docs on error_page

And thats why we use the 301 =307 redirect.

Using the nginx.conf file shown here, we are able to have http and https listen in on the same port

Web-server – How to capture and playback http web requests against multiple web servers

wireshark, ettercap, tcpdump and snort come to mind. Almost any libpcap application will do it. You might try freshmeat.net or sourceforge.net to look for packet capture applications. I am sure someone has developed something that would allow you to do a WWW Replay/Analysis.

If you can control the source, you could even put a router between that would allow you to capture the traffic. This is how a Man in the Middle Attack works.

However, short of writing some complex rules with snort, I'm not sure how easily you'll get the data you're looking for. tcpdump can write to files for each 'transaction', but, you still need to do a bit of decoding of the resulting files.

Any solution will likely be problematic if the POST machine uses https://

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Nginx – Handling http and https requests using a single port with nginx

nginx.conf

Web-server – How to capture and playback http web requests against multiple web servers

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