How to serve two web applications from one domain and different paths?

Question

I have a web app which can be accessed from http://example.com I'm developing locally another web app which I want to access it from the same domain but different path. Let's say I want all traffic from http://example.com/my-local-app/* go to my web app served from localhost:8080. All other requests should go to remote http://example.com. How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

You can consider nginx Reverse Proxy.

Example :

location ~ /my-local-app {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/;
}

In this situation, if any request comes to /my-local-app nginx will forward internally to localhost and return the response as well.

Answer 2

You can use virtualhosts for your two applications. One application will be accessible from http://first.example.com and another will be using http://second.example.com. You cannot run one web server on two different ports. Another option is to use nginx as you are using now and install apache on the same machine but configure apache server to run on a different port (8080) whereas nginx is running on port 80. Although not recommended, this would mean you need to manage two different web servers instead of one.

virtualhosts is the way IMO.