Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

Enabling proxy options

The first step is to enable proxying of requests in your location blocks. Since the proxy_pass directive cannot be placed at the http or server level, you need to include it in every single place that you want forwarded. Usually, a location / { fallback block suffices, since it encompasses all requests, except those that match location blocks containing a break statement.

The following is a simple example using a single static backend hosted on the same server:

server { 
  server_name .example.com; 
  root /home/example.com/www; 
  [...] 
  location / { 
      proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; 
  } 
} 

In the following example, we make use of an upstream block, allowing us to specify multiple servers:

upstream apache { server 192.168.0.1:80; ...