How to setup Nginx Reverse Proxy

Setting up a reverse proxy using Nginx involves the following steps:

1. Install Nginx: First, you need to install Nginx on your server. You can use your package manager to install Nginx on your system.
2. Configure Nginx: Next, you need to configure Nginx to act as a reverse proxy. To do this, you need to create a new configuration file in the /etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory.
3. Set up the upstream server: In the configuration file, you need to specify the upstream server that Nginx should proxy requests to. You can specify the IP address or hostname of the upstream server.
4. Define the server block: Next, you need to define the server block for the reverse proxy. This block specifies the listen directive that Nginx should use to listen for incoming connections.
5. Configure the location block: In the location block, you need to specify the path that Nginx should proxy requests to the upstream server. You can use regular expressions to match different paths.

Here is a sample configuration file that you can use as a starting point:

upstream backend {
    server backend.example.com;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://backend;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

In this example, Nginx is configured to listen on port 80 for requests to the example.com domain. All requests to this domain are proxied to the backend.example.com server.

The proxy_pass directive specifies the upstream server that Nginx should proxy requests to. The proxy_set_header directives set the Host and X-Real-IP headers for the proxied requests.

Once you have saved your configuration file, you can test it by running sudo nginx -t to check for syntax errors, and then sudo systemctl reload nginx to apply the changes.