Nginx reverse folder location to external website

Question

As a Nginx newbie i am trying to get a reverse proxy working to an external domain. Later on I will need to port to an internal domain. When trying to reverse proxy to an external domain i seem to hit a wall and the response is a 404 cannot be found.

The goal is when i try to access http://localhost/example the reverse proxy serves www.example.com.

This is my config:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;

    location / {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index  index.html index.htm;
    }

    location /example/ {
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_pass http://www.example.com/;
    }

    #error_page  404              /404.html;

    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    #
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }
}

Any hint what i am doing wrong?

Answer 1

When speaking about http, webserver detects which of configured servers was requested by checking Host header. In you case, you tell nginx to proxy requests to another server, but instruct it to pass original Host header to that server. Obviously, there is no configuration on remote server, which could accept request with that domain. So it responds you with 404.

To make it work, just change header to proxy_set_header Host www.example.com; where instead of www.example.com you should use same host as in proxy_pass directive. (or same variable)