Reverse proxy are really useful for accessing services on your server via https instead of http. This is also required when using an api, for example, on your website that uses SSL. As it is not allowed to access http resources from an https connection.

In this post, I'll show you how to setup a reverse proxy using nginx and secure it with a SSL certificate.

This tutorial presupposes, that you've installed nginx and setup server blocks. If you haven't, here's a guide: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-nginx-on-debian-10.

Setting up the server file

Firstly, we'll want to create a file name after the service your trying to reverse proxy, for example: reverse-proxy.conf. To do that, type: nano reverse-proxy.conf or vim reverse-proxy.conf if you know how to use vim.

Then insert this basic file:

server {
    server_name proxy.example.com;
    
    listen 80;
    
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

Now enter these command, to create a symbolic link for the file reverse-proxy.conf:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/reverse-proxy.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Restart nginx:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

And voila, you've created a reverse proxy making localhost:8080 available at proxy.example.com.

Creating and installing the SSL certificate

To be able to access the reverse proxy via https we'll have to create a SSL certificate using certbot.

I've created a comprehensive tutorial on how to create a certificate using certbot:

Then:

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