Nginx Reverse Proxy Template

A reusable, production-minded starter pack for reverse proxying application traffic with explicit timeouts, forwarded headers, compression, and useful logging.

NGINXREVERSE PROXYREUSABLE

What you get

templates/web-servers/nginx/
├── nginx.conf
├── conf.d/
│   └── reverse-proxy.conf
└── snippets/
    ├── proxy-headers.conf
    ├── gzip.conf
    ├── security-headers.conf
    └── tls.conf

Design goals

Predictable proxy behavior

Explicit connect, send, and read timeouts.

Useful request context

Forwarded headers preserve client and scheme information.

Operational visibility

Logs include request and upstream response time.

Reusable snippets

Headers, compression, TLS, and security are split cleanly.

Reverse proxy configuration

upstream backend {
    least_conn;
    server app1:8080 max_fails=3 fail_timeout=10s;
    server app2:8080 max_fails=3 fail_timeout=10s;
    keepalive 32;
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://backend;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;

        include /etc/nginx/snippets/proxy-headers.conf;

        proxy_connect_timeout 5s;
        proxy_send_timeout 30s;
        proxy_read_timeout 30s;
    }
}

Before production use

Adapt, do not blindly paste.

Review TLS, request body limits, buffering, timeouts, security headers, and upstream behavior for your application.

Verification

nginx -t
nginx -T

curl -I http://example.com
curl -v http://example.com

tail -f /var/log/nginx/access.log
tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log