Tag Archives: cgi

Uncategorized

Nginx Virtual Host and Reverse Proxy

1 Comment

Firstly, there’s no such thing as Virtual Host in nginx. , Virtual Host is an apache terminology.

Scenario:

  • Domain mycooldomain1.com pointing to VPS server
  • Nginx running on port 80
  • Tomcat running on port 8080
  • Only inbound TCP traffic to port 80 is allowed through firewall

In your nginx.conf (mine’s on /etc/nginx/nginx.conf), add following inside the http element:

http {
  ...
  server {

    server_name mycooldomain1.com;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/mycooldomain1.com.access.log main;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/mycooldomain1.com.error.log;

      location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
        proxy_redirect default;
        proxy_cookie_domain localhost mycooldomain1.com;
      }
  }
  ...
}

The server_name and location / expression matches request to http://mycooldomain.com while proxy_pass sets the backend where the response will be fetched from.

proxy_redirect ensures any 3xx redirects and Location: header on response is rewritten into mycooldomain1.com.

If your backend has different context root (eg: http://mycooldomain.com to http://localhost:8080/someapp) you will also need to adjust the cookie path

proxy_cookie_path /someapp/ /;