Setup local reverse proxy

MacOS

To allow this to work on your local machine, follow these steps:

1. Install nginx on your machine. For OSX users, you can run brew install nginx. If you don't have homebrew, you should install it.

2. After install, run: sudo nginx

3. Update the nginx configuration file in /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf with the following values in the http module.

server {
  listen                  80;
  listen                  443 ssl;
  ssl_certificate         /etc/ssl/certs/myssl.crt;
  ssl_certificate_key     /etc/ssl/private/myssl.key;
  server_name             myApp;

  # Backend Service
  location /local {
      proxy_pass  http://localhost:8000;
  }
  
  # Frontend
  location / {
      proxy_pass  http://localhost:3000/;
  }
}

3. Run sudo nginx -s stop and sudo nginx to update nginx with the new configurations.

4. Update your hosts file in /etc/hosts file with the following values.

127.0.0.1	    local.myapp.com

Linux (Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distro)

With Ubuntu, the setup is very similar to MacOS, but ever so slightly different.

1. Install nginx on your machine using sudo apt install nginx.

2. Create a new file for the reverse proxy at /etc/nginx/sites-available/reverse-proxy.conf with the contents from the MacOS section (step 2) above.

3. Create a symbolic link to the file in sites-enabled using sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/reverse-proxy.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/reverse-proxy.conf

4. Run sudo nginx -s stop and sudo nginx to update nginx with the new configurations.

5. Update your hosts file in /etc/hosts file with the following values from the MacOS section above (step 4).

Using https locally

To test https locally, run the script generate-self-signed-cert-locally.sh. Enter a passphrase, but don't worry about all the other details.

Then ensure you include the ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key values in your server definition within your nginx configuration file located at: /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf. It should look something like:

server {
    listen               443 ssl;
    ssl_certificate      /etc/ssl/certs/myssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key  /etc/ssl/private/myssl.key;
    server_name SERVER_NAME.com;
    location / {
    }
}