So I have a webserver running nginx, and I want to use it as a reverse proxy to access web applications running elsewhere. I know this is a pretty standard use case, and that the traditional approach is to use virtual hosts to proxy the different apps.

Like, normally you would do something like:

I am familiar with this approach, and know how to set it up.

In this case, there is a catch though. For reasons that I can’t get into here, I can’t use virtual hosts, and everything should be hosted in the same webserver.something domain. So I thought I would use a subpath to host each app.

What I want to do is this basically:

In my nginx config file I have something like this:

upstream app1 {
  server app1.host:3000;
}

server {
    ...
    location /app1 {
        proxy_pass http://app1/;
    }
    ...
}

This works to the extent that all requests going to /app1/* get forwarded to the correct application host. The issue though is that the application itself uses absolute paths to reference some resources. For example, app1 will try to reference a resource like /_app/something/something.js, which of course produces a 404 error.

I suppose that for this particular error I could map /_app/ to the app1 application host with another location statement, but that seems dirty to me and I don’t like it. First off it could quickly become a game of whack-a-mole, trying to get all the absolute paths remapped, and secondly it could easily lead to conflicts if other applications use that absolute path too.

So I guess my question is: is there a way to do this cleanly, and dynamically rewrite those absolute paths per app?

  • SeriousBug@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    You’ll need to check the documentation of every app, they usually have an option to set a base path so the app will add that base path to every link and resource.

    If some of the apps don’t have support for that, the next option would be to build from source and patch all the links yourself.

    • SpaceCadetOP
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      1 year ago

      I was afraid it was going to come down to that. I have been looking into configuration options for the apps, but they’re 3rd party nodejs apps and I know jack shit about nodejs so I’ve had no luck with it so far.

      Going with vhosts anyway (despite the pains it will create on this setup) seems to be the preferred way forward then.

      Thanks for the insight, and for confirming what I already suspected.