So I have a webserver running nginx, and I want to use it as a reverse proxy to access web applications running elsewhere. I know this is a pretty standard use case, and that the traditional approach is to use virtual hosts to proxy the different apps.
Like, normally you would do something like:
- https://app1.webserver.something => app1.host:3000
- https://app2.webserver.something => app2.host:1234
- https://app3.webserver.something => app3.host:8080
I am familiar with this approach, and know how to set it up.
In this case, there is a catch though. For reasons that I can't get into here, I can't use virtual hosts, and everything should be hosted in the same webserver.something domain. So I thought I would use a subpath to host each app.
What I want to do is this basically:
- https://webserver.something/app1 => app1.host:3000
- https://webserver.something/app2 => app2.host:1234
- https://webserver.something/app3 => app3.host:8080
In my nginx config file I have something like this:
upstream app1 {
server app1.host:3000;
}
server {
...
location /app1 {
proxy_pass http://app1/;
}
...
}
This works to the extent that all requests going to /app1/* get forwarded to the correct application host. The issue though is that the application itself uses absolute paths to reference some resources. For example, app1 will try to reference a resource like /_app/something/something.js, which of course produces a 404 error.
I suppose that for this particular error I could map /_app/ to the app1 application host with another location statement, but that seems dirty to me and I don't like it. First off it could quickly become a game of whack-a-mole, trying to get all the absolute paths remapped, and secondly it could easily lead to conflicts if other applications use that absolute path too.
So I guess my question is: is there a way to do this cleanly, and dynamically rewrite those absolute paths per app?
Yeah I remember those early days. KDE had a 1.0 version out in the late 90s, which was perfectly usable as a standalone desktop environment, while at the same time Gnome was little more than a panel with a foot. Early Gnome was an unholy mess and remained so until the late 2.x versions in the mid 2000s. Like how many window managers and file managers did they go through? I believe they even had Enlightenment as the default window manager for a while, and then there was that weird Ximian desktop phase.