nginx-basic-config

This repo contains an incredibly minimalist nginx.conf file that serves a very specific purpose: it puts all resources for a website under a common host (domain:port), using the path to determine which server to pull from. There are four different resources being proxied:

• NextJS REST API, located at localhost:3000/api
• NextJS websocket, located at localhost:3000/_next
• NextJS web pages, located at localhost:3000 (everything except /api/ and /_next/)
• New API, located at localhost:3001/api2

There are multiple reasons to put all of these resources behind a reverse proxy:

• I want to be able to set cookies in the new API server, which isn't possible if it's on a different host
• I don't want to have to set all sorts of CORS-related headers to get the client-server communication working
• The production environment will have everything under an application load balancer (ALB) that will handle all the proxying (minus the websocket), and I want my dev and prod environments to be as close as possible

Installation

N.B. This is tested on a Mac. If you're using this on something different, you will have to change these commands to match.

Use brew to install nginx:

brew update
brew install nginx

That's it.

Running nginx

Normally, nginx wants to run off files located in /usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.27.3/ or some such, but we want to test with our local file. There are all sorts of ways in which you can get this to start up automatically, etc., etc., but here we just want to get this running locally.

sudo nginx -c $PWD/nginx.conf

Alternatively:

sudo nginx -p $PWD -c nginx.conf

Tweaking your config

If you want to make changes to your config file and reload, do this:

sudo nginx -s reload

Shutting nginx down

sudo nginx -s quit