How to setup a reverse proxy using nginx?

Question

I am trying to get hostnames for my docker containers, and since I can only use a reverse proxy for that, I am trying to achieve exactly that with the help of nginx.

One docker container is a webservice that exposes the port 8080 to the my localhost.

So I can access the webserver via:

http://localhost:8080 

Instead I rather want to use:

http://webservice.local 

Hence I added to my /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 webservice.local 

I then installed nginx and added to the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default:

server { listen 80 default_server; listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; root /usr/share/nginx/html; index index.html index.htm; # Make site accessible from http://localhost/ server_name localhost; location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404. try_files $uri $uri/ =404; # Uncomment to enable naxsi on this location # include /etc/nginx/naxsi.rules } location webservice.local { proxy_pass http://localhost:8080 } 

After reloading nginx I get the following the error ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED when trying to open up http://webservice.local in my browser.

What did I do wrong? How can I setup the reverse proxy properly?

Answer 1

I'm not sure this is the correct syntax. Try something like that:

upstream myupstream { server 127.0.0.1:8080 fail_timeout=2s; keepalive 32; } location / { proxy_pass http://myupstream; proxy_redirect http://myupstream/ /; } 

something along these lines..

But if you just want to redirect port 8080 to 80 why not use a network utility like socat?

Then you should add virtualhosts in nginx for each upstream, and add those virtualhosts in DNS or /etc/hosts, which will all resolve to localhost.

Or you can just avoid the upstream and use virtualhosts like so:

server { listen 80; server_name myvirtualhost1.local; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; } server { listen 80; server_name myvirtualhost2.local; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9090; }