Hi,

I have a problem with a particular nginx setup. The scenario is like this: Applications need to access a couchdb service via a nginx proxy. The nginx needs to set an authorization header in order to get access to the backend. The problem is that the backend service endpoint's DNS changes sometimes and that's causing my services to stop working until I reload nginx.

I'm trying to setup the upstream as a variable, but when I do that, authorization stops working, the backend returns 403. When I just use the upstream directive, it works just fine. The upstream variable has the correct value, no errors in logs.

The config snippet below:

set $backend url.to.backend;

location / {
proxy_pass https://$backend/api;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Connection "";
proxy_set_header Host url.to.backend;
proxy_set_header Authorization "Basic <authorization_gibberish>";
proxy_temp_path /mnt/nginx_proxy;
}

Any help will be appreciated.