nginx reverse proxy to a set of pages with an additional path in the URL based on http referer?

Question

I have a 3rd-party ui server running in a docker container, exposed on port 8080.

It seems to expect to load resources with an absolute path: http://localhost:8080/index.html, http://localhost:8080/js/some_jsfiles etc.

I want to create a reverse proxy to it so it looks like it is coming from a different path:

https://myserver.com/stormui/index.html, https://myserver.com/stormui/js/...

first I tried

location /stormui/  {
         proxy_set_header Host $host;
         proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
         #rewrite ^/stormui/(.*) /$1  break;
         proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
}

The index.html page loads, but the browser still tries to load the refered content without the additional path, so I get a 404 on all the javascripts etc referenced from index.html.

Then I tried to use referer to do the rewrite location / {

    if ($http_referer ~ "^/stormui/.*") {
        rewrite ^/(.*) /stormui/$1  break;
    }

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

That didn't work, either. Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

I'm not sure I fully understand. Does the HTML (e.g. index.html) from the UI server (running on localhost:8080) contain absolute URLs? If so, you have two options:

1. Rewrite the HTML in the proxy server. I.e. change the URLs according to your needs.
2. I'd imagine there must be some settings to configure your UI server (origin server) such that it doesn't use these absolute URLs to localhost:8080.

I can't answer #2 without more details on what is running on the backend.