Why is nginx not recommended as a proxy?

[tlvince]

An issue with SSL termination (citation needed) /cc @janl

[jo]

Nginx encodes urls on the way through. So, for example, if you request http://my.couch.behind.nginx.com/mydb/foo%2Fbar it gets routed to CouchDB as /mydb/foo/bar, which is not what we want.

We can configure this mad behaviour away (by not appending a slash to the proxy_pass target :P) but there is no way to convince nginx not messing with the url when rewriting the proxy behind a subdirectory, eg http://my.couch.behind.nginx.com/_couchdb/mydb/foo%2Fbar

Just to mention one argument against nginx ;)

[jo]

3caf71dffb054aa718133d6c54829570744e93e4

[jo]

https://github.com/eHealthAfrica/ehealth-deployment/issues/151

[janl]

Here is a another one: https://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/4412004 — Last time I checked this was still not resolved.

[chrispahm]

Just stumbled upon this issue, but I thought I'd post a solution that works (at least for my usecase):

For a CouchDB located at http://my.couch.behind.nginx.com/mydb/, I use the following nginx configuration (simplified)

    location /mydb {
      rewrite /mydb/(.*) /$1 break;
      proxy_pass                           http://127.0.0.1:5984;
  }

The solution came up when discussing the issue on stackoverflow