Nginx at the edge
Warning: This document is old! It is likely wrong in some important way.
Nginx is a lightweight and powerful proxy server. It runs exceptionally well close to end users, and devs can do a lot with it: everything from manage global redirect rules to full blown apps with OpenResty.
Build an Nginx app
Fly runs apps bundled as Docker images. Go ahead and create a working directory for this guide, we’ll use nginx-example.
mkdir nginx-example
cd nginx-example
./nginx.conf
Nginx needs a configuration file, here’s a basic configuration for proxying requests to a Heroku application. Save this to your working directory as nginx.conf:
cat nginx.conf
user nginx;
worker_processes auto;
error_log /dev/stdout info; # log errors stdout for Fly
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
default_type application/octet-stream;
log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
'$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
'"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
access_log /dev/stdout main; # log requests to stdout
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
gzip on;
server {
listen 80;
server_name _;
keepalive_timeout 5;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host; # set x-forwarded-host from the original host header
proxy_redirect on; #rewrite redirects
proxy_pass https://example.herokuapp.com/; #proxy to heroku ap
}
}
}