Tips for setting up Nginx reverse proxy directories

Nginx is a widely used high-performance web server and proxy server software in network architecture. It is known for its excellent performance and reliability, especially in the application of reverse proxy is difficult to shake its position. How to set up Nginx reverse proxy directory correctly is an important topic that every web developer and administrator should pay attention to.

1. Basic principles of reverse proxy catalogs

To talk about Nginx reverse proxy directory setup tips, we first have to understand the basic principles of reverse proxy. To put it simply, reverse proxy refers to forwarding the client's request to the target server and returning the response to the client, which serves to hide the real server IP address, load balancing, cache acceleration and so on. In Nginx, by configuring the location directive of the proxy server, you can realize rule matching and distribution of requests to different URLs.

2. Setting up path matching rules for reverse proxy directories

In Nginx, the location directive is the key to setting up the reverse proxy directory. It matches the corresponding configuration rule based on the URL path of the request and specifies the address of the destination server. When setting up the reverse proxy directory, we can use matching symbols such as "=", "^~" and "~" to ensure the accuracy of the rules.

a) Use the "=" match symbol to match the directory path exactly:

nginx
location = /example {
proxy_pass http://backend_server;
}

With the above configuration, Nginx will only forward the request to the backend_server if the request path is "/example", which is suitable for scenarios where a specific directory needs to be reverse proxied.

b) Use the "^~" match symbol, prefixed to match directory paths:

nginx
location ^~ /example/ {
proxy_pass http://backend_server;
}

The "^~" notation is used to indicate that Nginx reverse proxies all URL requests that begin with "/example/" to the backend_server.This prefix matching is commonly used to proxy all files and subdirectories in a directory. directory and all files and subdirectories in that directory.

c) Use the "~" match symbol to match a directory path:

nginx
location ~ ^/example/(?. *)$ {
proxy_pass http://backend_server/$subpath; }
}

This regular expression based matching is relatively flexible and allows for more complex rules to be set up as required. In the above configuration, we use regular expressions to extract the subpath and forward the request to the corresponding subpath of the backend_server. For example, the request "/example/file.txt" will be forwarded to "http://backend_server/file.txt".

3. Configuration considerations for multiple reverse proxy directories

In practice, we often need to configure multiple reverse proxy directories. However, when using multiple location directives, you need to pay attention to the priority of the rules.Nginx will match different location directives in the following order:

- Nginx will match the exact match of the "=" symbol directive, and if the match is successful, it will stop matching other directives.
- Nginx will match the "^~" symbol directive, and if the match is successful, it will stop matching other directives.
- Nginx will match the regular matching "~" symbol directives in order of configuration and select the first successful match.

When configuring multiple reverse proxy directories, we need to set the order of the individual location directives appropriately in order to avoid conflicts and misdirection.

4. Advanced features of the Nginx reverse proxy directory

In addition to basic path matching, Nginx provides some advanced features for further optimizing reverse proxy directory settings.

a) Load balancing:

By setting up a reverse proxy directory, we can distribute requests to multiple back-end servers to achieve the effect of load balancing. Example:

nginx
http {
upstream backend_servers {
server backend1.example.com;
server backend2.example.com;
}

server {
location /example/ {
proxy_pass http://backend_servers; }
}
}
}

In the above configuration, the upstream directive is configured to define multiple backend servers to which Nginx will distribute requests from the "/example/" directory.

b) Disable caching:

Sometimes, we don't want Nginx to cache the content of the reverse proxy. To do this, you can use the proxy_cache_bypass directive and set it to true to disable caching.

nginx
location /example/ {
proxy_pass http://backend_server;
proxy_cache_bypass true;
}

With the proxy_cache_bypass directive set in the above configuration, Nginx will no longer cache anything when proxying the "/example/" directory.