Using an alternate base dir

Traditionally, Bitwarden is limited to residing at the root of a subdomain, e.g. https://bitwarden.example.com.

This limitation originates in the backend and web vault, which haven't been designed to accommodate alternate base dirs (see bitwarden/server#277). The mobile/desktop apps and browser extensions actually have no issues using a base URL with a path.

In bitwarden_rs, with the changes in PR#868 (backend) and PR#11 (web vault), you can configure a fully functional instance at an alternate base dir.

Configuration

Simply configure your domain URL to include the base dir. For example, suppose you want to access your instance at https://bitwarden.example.com/base-dir. (Note that you can also use multiple levels of directories, like https://bitwarden.example.com/multi/level/base/dirif you want.)

1. Stop bitwarden_rs.

2. If you normally configure bitwarden_rs using the admin page, edit your config.json to look as follows:

   {
     "domain": "https://bitwarden.example.com/base-dir",
     // ... other values ...
   }

3. If you normally configure bitwarden_rs via environment variables, update your config files/scripts to set the DOMAIN environment variable to the base URL. For example:

   docker run -e DOMAIN="https://bitwarden.example.com/base-dir" ...

4. Restart bitwarden_rs.

5. You should now be able to access the web vault at https://bitwarden.example.com/base-dir/ (note the trailing slash). For reasons not entirely clear, you'll probably run into issues if you use https://bitwarden.example.com/base-dir (without the trailing slash).

6. Configure your apps or browser extensions to use https://bitwarden.example.com/base-dir. If you add a trailing slash, the apps and extensions will automatically remove it before saving.

7. Note over 5. The trailing slash / issue could be solved by appending / after the route location string. For example, in nginx.

   location /my-base-path {
     # This config would cause `/` issue
   }
   
   location /my-base-path-2/ {
     # This config works perfectly
   }
   

Reverse proxying

If you are putting bitwarden_rs behind a reverse proxy, make sure your proxy is configured to pass the request path through to bitwarden_rs, since the bitwarden_rs API routes are set up to expect the base dir. So if a request for https://bitwarden.example.com/base-dir/api/sync hits your reverse proxy, which then proxies to your bitwarden_rs listening on localhost:8080, the request must go to http://localhost:8080/base-dir/api/sync, not http://localhost:8080/api/sync.