Proxying multiple locations with NGINX
March 4, 2019
Yesterday a customer from Japan contacted me if he could test the Perl application I had written on a test server on the Internet first. Since I had already the application running in a virtual machine on my 2014 Mac mini I decided to create a reverse tunnel and proxy to it from an existing site instead of setting up a whole new site on a VPS.
The application used the board and uploads paths which don't
conflict with the online site. And the few files that I needed to have
in the document root for this application to work don't conflict
either.
I used scp to upload the .htaccess, CSS stylesheet, and a JavaScript
file to the document root of the site. Next I used vi to open
virtual.conf located in /etc/nginx/conf.d and added the location
section given below:
server {
:
:
:
location ~ /(board|uploads)/ {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Client-Verify SUCCESS;
proxy_set_header X-Client-DN $ssl_client_s_dn;
proxy_set_header X-SSL-Subject $ssl_client_s_dn;
proxy_set_header X-SSL-Issuer $ssl_client_i_dn;
proxy_read_timeout 30;
proxy_connect_timeout 30;
}
}
Since I want to proxy multiple locations I used a regular expression which
matches both /board/ and /uploads/.
On the VPS I restarted the NGINX webserver. Now, requests to both
/board/ and /uploads/ are proxied to port 8080 on the VPS
itself. Of course there was yet no process listening on
localhost:8080 so opening http://example.com/board/ in a browser
resulted in a "502 Bad Gateway" error message being displayed.
In order to glue the pieces together a reverse tunnel had to be created on the virtual machine running the developed Perl application to the website on the VPS:
ssh -f -N -R 8080:localhost:8080 user@example.com
Being a reverse tunnel this makes that requests to
http://example.com/board/ on the Internet are proxied to
http://localhost:8080/board/ on the virtual machine.