Sample nginx.conf settings to perform reverse proxy functionality to.

ReadMe.md

Read Me

In order to access a server hosted within a vm (guest), for development purposes from the host OS, which is restricted to same origin / localhost only requests, I set up a siple nginx reverse proxy to forward my requests.

Steps

1. To install in a Windows VM, download and install nginx from the current, stable release; I installed to C:\nginx\
2. Edit the <install path>/conf/nginx.conf file with the marked changes in the file of the same name in this gist.
3. Start the nginx executable, located in your install path. There are service wrappers for Windows, or you can just kill the process to stop the nginx instance.

Commands for Windows

More information on the implementation of nginx in Windows can be found on the corresponding docs page. Here's the basic breakdown of commands, form within the nginx install directory:

Command
start nginx	starts the process
nginx -s stop	fast shutdown
nginx -s quit	graceful shutdown
nginx -s reload	config change, graceful shutdown of existing worker proc, starts new
nginx -s reopen	re-open log files

Description

The config file contains a server block, inside which is a location / block. Inside that location block, we need to replace the root and index assignment with a proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; line and a proxy_http_version 1.1; line.

Profit

nginx.conf

...
server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;
        
        # adds gzip options
        gzip on;
	gzip_types      text/css text/plain text/xml application/xml application/javascript application/x-javascript text/javascript application/json text/x-json;
	gzip_proxied    no-store no-cache private expired auth;
	#gzip_min_length 1000;
	gzip_disable     "MSIE [1-6]\.";

        ...
		
	location / {
		# Backend server to forward requests to/from
		proxy_pass          http://127.0.0.1:8080;
		proxy_http_version  1.1;
		
		# adds gzip
		gzip_static on;
		
	}
	...
...