Mapping ports and sub-domains with NGINX reverse proxy

This is simple step by step guide to setup a Reverse Proxy using nginx in Linux. Installing step takes Ubuntu for example, but you can go to nginx page for other platform install guide.

Intro

For simplicity, let assume our situation like this:

• We have a domain example.com.
• We have a server, running Ubuntu for example.
• This server running 2 web pages, in separate HTTP ports: 1111 and 2222.
• We want to use root domain example.com to serve web page in port 1111.
• We want to add a blog to sub domain blog.example.com, which serve web page in port 2222.

In short, we want to forward visitor like this:

• example.com -> localhost:1111
• blog.example.com -> localhost:2222

Install

Here is install for Ubuntu with apt tool. For other OS, you can go to nginx home page for detail.

apt install nginx  

Declare sites

We declare rules for proxy by create 2 files in /etc/nginx/sites-available/

For root domain example.com:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:1111;
    include /etc/nginx/proxy_params;
  }
}

For sub domain blog.example.com:

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/blog.example.com

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name blog.example.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2222;
    include /etc/nginx/proxy_params;
  }
}

Enable sites

Link your sites configuration from folder sites-available to folder sites-enabled:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/example.com
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/blog.example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/blog.example.com

Restart nginx

service nginx restart