Use nginx as a reverse proxy for Tomcat on Windows

Goal: By the end of this tutorial you will have configured a completely new Windows nginx configuration, and have it proxy your Tomcat application so you can access your website in a www.mywebsite.com fashion.

All of this assumes you already changed your DNS so it’s pointing to your server. If you don’t know how to do that google how to do so for your specific registrar, in my case I use gandi and you can find instructions of how to change your DNS zone here

Go to the nginx download page and download the latest Windows version, as of writting this 1.9.1.

After unzipping the file go into the nginx/conf/nginx.conf file and remove the contents, replace them with this:

nginx.conf

worker_processes  1;
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    include C:/path-to-nginx/nginx/conf/sites-enabled/*.conf;
}

Note the path-to-nginx above, make sure to replace that with the actual path to your nginx folder.

After that create a folder called sites-enabled in nginx/conf/sites-enabled. Then inside that folder create a file with your domain name ending in .conf like so:

erick-romero.conf

server {
    server_name  erick-romero.com;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

Inside the above file make sure you change your server_name to your domain name and http://localhost:8080 to use the port you use on your Tomcat application, then deploy your Tomcat application.

Go to the root of your nginx application and run the nginx.exe file as administrator. You can also travel to that folder with your Command Line/Powershell and type start nginx, both will work.

If you have done everything correctly your application should now be running! Congratulations.