Nginx proxying for Tomcat applications

As Tomcat is not a true web server, it's worth to use it as backend. Nginx is one of the best solutions for the frontend web server.

So, after a typical XWiki installation we have XWiki running on http://localhost:8080/xwiki. Most probably, we want to access XWiki viahttp://mydomain.com on standard 80 port. Tuning Nginx will give us the desired result:

• create this file /etc/nginx/conf.d/tomcat.conf
• put the following code inside:
  server {
      listen       80;
      server_name  mydomain.com;
  # Root to the XWiki application
      root  opt/tomcat/webapps/xwiki;
  
      location / {
  #All "root" requests will have /xwiki appended AND redirected to mydomain.com again
          rewrite ^ $scheme://$server_name/xwiki$request_uri? permanent;
      }
  
      location ^~ /xwiki {
  # If path starts with /xwiki - then redirect to backend: XWiki application in Tomcat
         proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/xwiki;
  
      }
  }
• restart nginx

Now all http://mydomain.com/* requests will lead to the XWiki application. Please note that these settings are basic. For more flexible solutions please refer to the Nginx documentation.