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Matt Voget
Matt Voget

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Host a Reverse Proxy in Seconds

#api #nginx #development #devops

Need a publicly accessible reverse proxy? Want to skip testing with localhost? Blackbird has an easy solution.

Setting up the Proxy

First let’s configure a simple reverse proxy with nginx using the following nginx.conf:

server { listen 80; location / { proxy_pass "https://httpbin.org/"; } }
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All requests sent to this server will proxy out to httpbin.org — a nice tool for developing and testing this proxy with downstream servers/APIs.

Next, we’ll define a simple Dockerfile that uses our ngnix configuration to build an image:

FROM nginxinc/nginx-unprivileged COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf EXPOSE 80 USER 1000 CMD ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]
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Hosting the Proxy with Blackbird

After installing the Blackbird CLI, we can publicly host this reverse proxy with a Blackbird deployment:

blackbird deployment create proxy -d Dockerfile -c . ✔ input validated ✔ environment is ready ✔ no matching mock instance found ✔ image successfully built ✔ image successfully pushed ✔ checking existing deployments ✔ creating application for deployment ✔ application deployment created +-------+------------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+ | NAME | TYPE | STATUS | URL | +-------+------------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+ | proxy | deployment | Ready | https://matts-org-a0696.blackbird-relay.a8r.io/proxy/ | +-------+------------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
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Blackbird gave us a public host that is running our reverse proxy in a container - let’s try it out:

curl --request POST -d '{"message":"hello"}' \ https://matts-org-a0696.blackbird-relay.a8r.io/proxy/post { "args": {}, "data": "{\"message\":\"hello\"}", "files": {}, "form": {}, "headers": { "Accept": "*/*", "Content-Length": "19", "Content-Type": "application/json", "Host": "httpbin.org", "User-Agent": "curl/8.6.0" }, "json": { "message": "hello" }, "url": "https://httpbin.org/post" }
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Just like that, our reverse proxy is live and hosted 🚀

Happy proxying!

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