Lev Lazinskiy

Proxy Everything into a Linux Container with nginx

I previously wrote about setting up Node.js + Ghost in an Ubuntu LXC container and using Apache to proxy all web requests into that container. This works pretty well for the most part, but it seems like nginx is much better tool for this since it was pretty much designed to be a proxy server. We have a server that we are using for all Bit-Monkeys projects and I recently set up gitlab, along with a development site for openfaqs inside of LXC containers. The main benefit of this approach is that you can isolate the environments, manage upgrades and updates of various pieces separately, and fix issues in one environment without bringing down your entire infrastructure. Setting this up to work with nginx is super easy. First you will need to grab the IP address of your container which you can easily get by running as the root user

lxc-ls --fancy

vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite

server {  
listen 80;

server_name dev.openfaqs.com www.dev.openfaqs.com;

location / {

  proxy_pass http://10.0.3.194:5000;

  proxy_set_header Host $host;

  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-for $remote_addr;

  port_in_redirect off;

  proxy_redirect http://10.0.3.194:5000 /;

  proxy_connect_timeout 300;

  }

}

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/yoursite  
service nginx restart