Configuring a reverse-proxy for HTTPS connection

aaron

Thanks in advance for any help!

I'm running my forum on Ubuntu 13.1 on an EC2 instance. I'm using Apache 2 as a reverse proxy server to establish a secure connection on port 443.

The problem is that when I visit the website via HTTPS, I get many errors of these 3 types:

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 502 (Proxy Error)
Uncaught ReferenceError: require is not defined
Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

Here's my config file:

<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName forum.ligma.com
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/forum_ligma_com.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/ubuntu/.ssh/myserver.key
SSLCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/combined-ca.crt
<IfModule mod_proxy.c>
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
</IfModule>
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:4568
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:4568
</VirtualHost>

Any ideas what's going wrong? Do you think it has something to do with Apache or NodeBB? Thanks!

aaron

@julian @miksago @baris @travis-burandt

Thanks for your help pointing me to this solution in the first place. I did get the reverse proxy set up. Unfortunately the page is rendered without any CSS or JS.

Do you think there's a fix I could make on NodeBB or is it maybe a permissions issue I could solve on the EC2 dashboard?

I'd really appreciate any advice on this one. I'm at a dead end. Thanks!

julian

That's weird... what happens when you view the source and try to go to the css file directly?

Actually, come to think of it, I just refactored the js and css file handling today, so maybe give the latest version a go.

aaron

Hi @julian thanks for the help! I'll try upgrading it.

When I navigate to https://forum.figma.com/vendor/fontawesome/css/font-awesome.min.css, I get to a 502 Proxy Error page with this text:

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /vendor/fontawesome/css/font-awesome.min.css.

Reason: DNS lookup failure for: 127.0.0.1:4567vendor

Apache/2.4.6 (Ubuntu) Server at forum.figma.com Port 443

julian

Hm, looks like it's missing a /. Let me know if the latest version helps (though plugin js still might be off...)

kelso

As @julian suggested, add a trailing / to both your proxypaths in your apache config.

aaron

Hi, thanks everyone! You're the best! The site loads perfectly now.

As for upgrading, I think I may be a major revision behind. Can you point me to instructions to safely upgrade? I'm not even sure which version I'm currently running on...

Thanks!

finid

@aaron

The version you are running should be clearly visible on the ACP home page.

aaron

Thanks @planner. Okay, so I'm running 0.3.0. And it looks like the current release is 0.3.2. When I pull, it lists all the conflicts along with the files it's auto-merging and removing. Since I have a backup of the last version and I only made a couple small changes I can easily redo, I'd like to just upgrade unconditionally (assuming the new version will still be able to talk to my Redis instance!).

Should I just delete all the files in my forum directory and do a new git pull??

Thanks!
Aaron

finid

@aaron

This is how I upgrade (based on the official guide)

cd /var/lib/redis
cp dump.db /some/dir
cp appendonly.aof /some/dir
git pull (from NodeBB install root dir.)
./nodebb upgrade

So far, I've never gad any issues upgrading, other than losing modifications to templates files that were hard-coded. But those modifications were for testing, so they did not bother me much.

julian

@aaron -- to discard all changes on your working copy (again, this discards all changes git reset --hard HEAD

Then git pull && ./nodebb upgrade