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?

  • Aux@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Apps control the URLs. They either provide configuration for that and then you have to set them up manually, or they don’t and you’re screwed. Use sub-domains. You can use the wildcard domain (*) to point everything to the same IP address and then let nginx deal with it.

    • SpaceCadetOP
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      1 year ago

      You can use the wildcard domain

      Yeah the problem was more that this machine is running on a network where I don’t really control the DNS. That is to say, there’s a shitty ISP router with DHCP and automatic dynamic DNS baked in, but no way to add additional manual entries for vhosts.

      I thought about screwing with the /etc/hosts file to get around it but what I ended up doing instead is installing a pihole docker for DNS (something I had been contemplating anyway), pointing it to the router’s DNS, so every local DNS name still resolves, and then added manual entries for the vhosts.

      Another issue I didn’t really want to deal with was regenerating the TLS certificate for the nginx server to make it valid for every vhost, but I just bit through that bullet.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If you’re serious about self hosting, you shouldn’t use an ISP router. Buy a proper router which will allow you to dynamically manage DNS records. My recommendation would be top end ASUS routers.

        For SSL certificate management, use https://nginxproxymanager.com/ You just add a new domain there and it will fetch and manage a certificate for the domain.