How to use NGINX to proxy requests for Confluence

Purpose

This page describes a possible way to use NGINX to proxy requests for Confluence running in a standard Tomcat container. You can find additional documentation that explains how to use Apache mod_proxy for the very same purpose.  For Confluence 6.0 or later you’ll need a version of NGINX that supports WebSockets (1.3 or later).

Solution

Configuring Tomcat

Set context path

Set your Confluence application path (the part after hostname and port) in Tomcat.  Edit <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL>/conf/server.xml, locate the “Context” definition:

<Context path="" docBase="../confluence" debug="0" reloadable="false">

and change it to:

<Context path="/confluence" docBase="../confluence" debug="0" reloadable="false">

Restart Confluence, and check you can access it at http://example:8090/confluence

Set the URL for redirection

Next, set the URL for redirection. In the same <CONFLUENCE-INSTALL>/conf/server.xml file, locate this code segment:

<Connector port="8090" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"
           maxThreads="48" minSpareThreads="10"
           enableLookups="false" acceptCount="10" debug="0" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
           protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"/>

And append the last line:

<Connector port="8090" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"
           maxThreads="48" minSpareThreads="10"
           enableLookups="false" acceptCount="10" debug="0" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
           protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"
           proxyName="www.example.com" proxyPort="80"/>

Configure NGINX

You will need to specify a listening server in NGINX, as in the example below. Add the following to your NGINX configuration:

For Confluence 6.0 and later:

server {
    listen www.example.com:80;
    server_name www.example.com;
    location /confluence {
        client_max_body_size 100m;
        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:8090/confluence;
    }
    location /synchrony {
        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:8091/synchrony;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
    }
}

For Confluence 5.10 and earlier:

server {
    listen www.example.com:80;
    server_name www.example.com;
    location /confluence {
        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:8090/confluence;
    }
}

If the NGINX proxy is not listening to the same IP that the hostname resolves, please use the IP address that the proxy is listening to instead of the application hostname.

Set base URL

For normal operation of Confluence you will also need to set the base URL accordingly. In this example the base URL would be set to http://www.example.com/confluence.

Notes

• For the settings above to take effect you need to restart both Confluence (including Synchrony) and NGINX.
•  If you encounter problems with input validation, it might be caused by the gzip compression enabled in reverse proxying. Such an issue is described in the Create Space button inactive in Add Space dialog article.
• If you do not have a context path for Confluence, ensure there is no trailing slash ‘/‘ symbol at the URL in the proxy_pass line. Otherwise, you might run into this issue. For example:

  server {
      listen www.example.com:80;
      server_name www.example.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:8090;
      }
  }

• If you experience 413 Request Entity Too Large errors, make sure that the client_max_body_size in the /confluence location block matches Confluence’s maximum attachment size. You may also need to increase the client_max_body_size in the /synchrony location block if you experience errors when editing large pages.