Nginx aliases and proxy_pass

Question

I'm using nginx as web front-end and apache2 as web back-end. Apache runs several websites locally and nginx access them.

At the moment, different sub-domains are hosted, but I want to migrate them into a single one using http://my-single-domain.com/subdomain-alias thanks to nginx.

The root directory and the apache2 vhost port is different for each sub-domain (sounds obvious, doesn't it?).

I tried several configurations but I cannot get the resource being sent, i.e., the index html is sent but the resources are not found by the server (404 Not Found) despite the rule root being set.

I tried several solution such as:

location /alias1 {
  proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:9095/;
  include      /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
}

or

location /alias1 {
  alias  /alias1/;
  proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:9095/;
  include      /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
}

or even

location /alias1/ {
  rewrite ^/alias1(/.*)$ $1 break;
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9095/;
}

or again

location /alias1/ {
  rewrite ^/alias1(/.*)$ $1 break;
  proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:9095/;
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}

What is wrong with this setup? How to set nginx to retrieves assets from a specific root directory when the age /alias1/page is requested ?

---

Asked first on webmasters.stackexchange.com

---### /etc/nginx/proxy.conf 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-Proto https; #client_max_body_size 10m; #client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_connect_timeout 90; #proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; proxy_buffers 32 4k;

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

 user              www-data  www-data;

 worker_processes  2;

 pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;

 worker_rlimit_nofile 1024;

 events {
         worker_connections 512;
 }


 http {

         include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
         default_type application/octet-stream;
         sendfile "on";
         tcp_nopush "on";
         tcp_nodelay "on";
         keepalive_timeout "65";
         access_log "/var/log/nginx/access.log";
         error_log "/var/log/nginx/error.log";
         server_tokens off;
         types_hash_max_size 2048;

         include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
         include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*/*;
 }

/etc/nginx/site-enable/single-domain.conf

server {
        listen      443;
        ssl on;
        ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/private/single-domain.com-with_chain.crt;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/single-domain.com.key.pem;

        ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES128-GCM-SHA256:kEDH+AESGCM:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA:DHE-DSS-AES128-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256:DHE-DSS-AES256-SHA:DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA:AES128-GCM-SHA256:AES256-GCM-SHA384:AES128-SHA256:AES256-SHA256:AES128-SHA:AES256-SHA:AES:CAMELLIA:DES-CBC3-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXPORT:!DES:!RC4:!MD5:!PSK:!aECDH:!EDH-DSS-DES-CBC3-SHA:!EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA:!KRB5-DES-CBC3-SHA';
        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
        ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/private/dhparams.pem;

        server_name www.single-domain.com;

        location / {
                proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:8090/;
                include      /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
        }

        location /alias/ {
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:8103/;
        proxy_set_header Host alias.single-domain.com;
        root /var/www/alias.single-domain.com;
        }

        location ~* \.(jpg|png|gif|jpeg|css|js|mp3|wav|swf|mov|doc|pdf|xls|ppt|docx|pptx|xlsx|otf|eot|svg|ttf|woff)$ {
                root /var/www/single-domain.com/public;
                proxy_buffering on;
                proxy_cache_valid 200 120m;
                expires 864000;
        }

        access_log /var/log/nginx/single-domain.com/www-access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/single-domain.com/www-error.log;
}

Answer 1

If apache is listening on port 9095 for domain sub1.example.com and on port 9096 for domain sub2.example.com, and you want nginx to pass http://www.example.com/alias1 to first, and http://www.example.com/alias2 to second apache virtualhost, you would do:

location /alias1/ {
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:9095/;
        proxy_set_header Host sub1.example.com;
}

location /alias2/ {
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:9096/;
        proxy_set_header Host sub2.example.com;
}

then for example original request to nginx at http://your-single-domain.example.com/alias1/foo/page1.html would be forwarded to apache as if it went to http://sub1.example.com:9095/foo/page1.html

And original request to nginx at http://your-single-domain.example.com/alias2/bar/baz/page2.html would be forwarded to apache as if it went to http://sub2.example.com:9096/bar/baz/page2.html

Update1 (proof of concept): with the nginx having only config file as above, we run netcat as nc -l -p 9095 (apache should not be listening on that port for this debug), and then open in browser http://www.single-domain.com/alias1/assets/style.css. We should see in netcat output the following:

GET /assets/style.css HTTP/1.1
Host: sub1.example.com
Connection: close
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0 Iceweasel/38.6.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
DNT: 1

If there was apache listening on port 9095 instead of our netcat, it would thus get HTTP/1.1 request for URL "http://sub1.example.com/assets/style.css" (which would be shown in /var/log/apache2/access_log or similar)

Note that rewrite ^/alias1(/.*)$ $1 break; isn't needed, as location /alias1/ will automatically strip that /alias1/ part of URL.

If you get different output when using your nginx config file, that means you have conflicting directives in nginx - I that case recommend starting with just the configuration in this answer, checking that it works, and then start adding old configuration blocks one by one until it breaks - and then you'll have conflicting block which needs to change.

Update2: since you posted your nginx config, it is obvious - you have location override that says all your .css files (along the bunch of other files) are to be served directly with nginx from /var/www/single-domain.com/public. Remove or edit it, and it will go through apache.