Super-simple Nginx reverse proxy with Homebrew on OS X

a Super-simple Nginx reverse proxy with Homebrew on OS X.md

Installation

1)

brew install nginx
sudo cp /usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.8.0/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist /Library/LaunchAgents

2)

Replace /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf with the nginx.conf in this gist. I'm using port 5000 for my current project. Obviously, change server_name as well, and probably the name of its access log.

3)

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist

nginx.conf

# Replace /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf with this. This is the
# default location for Nginx according to 'nginx -h'
worker_processes 1;
error_log /usr/local/var/log/nginx/error.log;

events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
  # This should be in the same directory as this conf
  # e.g. /usr/local/etc/nginx
  include       mime.types;
  default_type  application/octet-stream;
  
  # Note this log_format is named 'main', and is used with the access log below
  log_format   main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local]  $status '
    '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

  sendfile        on;
  keepalive_timeout  65;

  # Without this I got this error: 'upstream sent too big header
  # while reading response header from upstream'
  proxy_buffer_size   128k;
  proxy_buffers   4 256k;
  proxy_busy_buffers_size   256k;

  server {
      listen 80;
      server_name dev.copypastafarianism.org;
      access_log /usr/local/var/log/nginx/copypastafarianism.access.log  main;

      location / {
          proxy_pass         http://0.0.0.0:5000;
      }
  }
}

Great! Thanks 👍

For those wondering why this doesn't immediately work, your domain needs to be in /etc/hosts as well, like:
127.0.0.1 dev.copypastafarianism.org

And you can use localhost instead of 0.0.0.0, but it should work regardless.

@kesarion Or use DNSMASQ

I copied this exactly, yet I'm always getting 502: Bad Gateway.
Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

error.log:
2017/02/27 21:21:26 [error] 12186#0: *1 kevent() reported that connect() failed (61: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: dev.mydevdomain.tv, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://0.0.0.0:5000/favicon.ico", host: "dev.mydevdomain.tv", referrer: "http://dev.mydevdomain.tv/"

@lan3jur, do you have anything running at localhost:5000? That proxy_pass is where nginx will proxy requests for http://localhost:80 to. As an example, set it to http://www.simplesite.com/, and assuming that you have
127.0.0.1 dev.copypastafarianism.org in your /etc/hosts, when you point your browser to http://dev.copypastafarianism.org, you'll see a page from http://www.simplesite.com/.

How would the https config look like for this?

You should inclued proxy_set_header Host $host; in your location block to make apache-vhosts work.

only work running the server using sudo command, in case it serves to someone.

Marvelous!!

I got cp: /usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.8.0/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist: No such file or directory
While running the second command: sudo cp /usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.8.0/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist /Library/LaunchAgents

Does that need to be updated?

@ShayMe21 you can check where your cellar file is by running brew --cellar. In my case, it's /opt/homebrew/Cellar. So swapping that should work!

i got /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist: Path had bad ownership/permissions Load failed: 122: Path had bad ownership/permissions when ran sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist. what did i miss?

macOs Ventura