Day 28: Nginx Setup & Reverse Proxy

Hey DevOps enthusiasts! 👋
Welcome to Day 28 of my journey. Today wraps up the final piece of our manual provisioning stack setup using Vagrant multi-VMs.

In this article, we’re focusing on setting up Nginx as a frontend web server that acts as a reverse proxy for our Java application running on Tomcat.

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🔁 Recap of the Stack So Far

Over the last few days, we’ve:

✅ Created a multi-VM setup with Vagrant
✅ Installed and configured:

• MySQL (Database)

• Memcached (Caching)

• RabbitMQ (Message Broker)

• Tomcat (Application Server)
  ✅ Built and deployed a Java app using Maven
  Now let’s connect it all with Nginx!

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🚀 Step 1: Access Nginx VM

vagrant ssh web01
$ sudo -i

✅ Verify /etc/hosts for proper hostname entries across VMs.

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🔄 Step 2: Update System & Install Nginx

apt update
apt install nginx -y

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📁 Step 3: Configure Nginx

Create a new config file:

vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/vproapp

Paste the following:

upstream vproapp {
    server app01:8080;
}

server {
    listen 80;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://vproapp;
    }
}

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🔗 Step 4: Activate the Website

rm -rf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/vproapp /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/vproapp

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🔄 Step 5: Restart Nginx

systemctl restart nginx

✅ Visit your web server's IP address — you should now see the Java web application served via Nginx.

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🧩 How This Works

• Nginx listens on port 80.

• It forwards all traffic to app01:8080 where Tomcat is running.

• Other backend services (MySQL, RabbitMQ, Memcached) are already wired via configuration.

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✅ What We Accomplished in This 4-Part Series

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📌 Final Thoughts

You now have a fully working Java stack setup manually with:

• Configurable Vagrant VMs

• Linux system administration

• App deployment pipeline

This is a foundational setup before diving into automation with provisioning tools like Shell, Ansible, or Terraform — which I’ll cover next!

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Stay Tuned!

Next week, I’ll rebuild this exact setup using Vagrant provisioning scripts to automate it all from scratch 🚀

Until then, happy provisioning!

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