Easy Reverse Proxy Config for Nginx

Introduction

This guide will show you how to set up a reverse proxy for your web server using Nginx. A reverse proxy is a really handy tool that allows use to redirect traffic incoming to our server to a different location, for example to another web server, or to a different port.

I find this most useful for redirecting requests to different dockerised services, but it can be used for many other things too.

Config

The config for a reverse proxy is really simple. Here's an example of a basic reverse proxy config:

server {
    listen                  80;
    server_name             my-site.com

    location / {
        proxy_pass          http://localhost:5000;
        proxy_redirect      off;
        proxy_set_header    Host $host;
        proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
    }
}

This config will redirect all traffic coming to my-site.com to http://localhost:5000. This method will also easily allow you to add SSL to your services, as you can use the certbot tool to generate SSL certificates for your domain. Certbot will automatically configure this basic reverse proxy config to use SSL.