Editing One Quick Way To Host A WebApp (section)

=== Nginx ===

Nginx is a good web server to use as a reverse proxy. Some people use Caddy since it has Let's Encrypt built-in for HTTPS but this works for me so I use it. k3s and friends use Traefik and that works well too. In the LLM age, one advantage is that Nginx is well-documented and has been around for a while with a consistent configuration format.

As usual I make one of these simple config files in `/etc/nginx/sites-available/sub.roshangeorge.dev` and symlink from `/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/sub.roshangeorge.dev` to it.

<syntaxhighlight lang="nginx">
server {

    server_name sub.roshangeorge.dev;

    location /uploads/ {
        alias /mnt/r2/uploads/; # Serve static files from this directory
        expires max;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:10000; # Proxy pass to app
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }

}
</syntaxhighlight>


This is roughly the same each time. I want some things to be static, usually favicons and robots.txt and llms.txt and stuff like that. And the rest I'm going to send over to the app which is going to run at that port.

I perform the cargo-cult ritual of restarting nginx after each of these things, though technically a `reload` should do the trick.

    sudo systemctl restart nginx

Once this is all running, we should be able to go to http://sub.roshangeorge.dev and it should correctly show what the app would show (which in our case is Python's default `http.server`). If I have websockets  there are a [https://stackoverflow.com/a/14969925 few more incantations around the `Upgrade` header].