Sorry for the newbie question, but I am struggling trying to rewrite and redirect a URL.

The external URL is www.mydomain:443/app1. The internal URL is 192.168.1.2:8080. Nginx is running on 192.168.1.1. I have tried several things looking at the docs and the forum. I believe I need 1 command to rewite the URL and then a second to redirect. I tried the code below, but it is not working.

location /app1{
rewrite ^/app1(.*) https://192.168.1.1$1 permanent;
proxy_pass https://192.168.1.2:8080;

location /app1/ {
rewrite /app1/([^/]+) /$1 break;
proxy_pass https://192.168.1.2:8080/;
}

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nginx for Windows http://nginx-win.ecsds.eu/

This is getting closer. URL now comes across as https://www.mydomain.net/api/4/, but the page is blank. The internal URL that display correctly is https://192.168.1.2:8080/api/4. Does Nginx pass https://www.mydomain.net on internally as https://192.168.1.2:8080?

Try it without the trailing / in proxypass.

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nginx for Windows http://nginx-win.ecsds.eu/

Removing the trailing / on the proxy_pas line caused the URL to change from https://www.mydomian.net/api/4/ to https://osuhickeys.no-ip.org/app1. I get a blank page then instead of a 404 Not Found like before.

Check the logfiles where the file is being looked for, the rewrite changes the client request towards where the backend should have the files requested, that needs to match.

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nginx for Windows http://nginx-win.ecsds.eu/

Here are the last 2 entries which I think relate to the test with and without the slash.

172.98.67.120 - - [18/Oct/2016:15:11:23 -0500] "GET /app1/ HTTP/1.1" 307 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36"

172.98.67.120 - - [18/Oct/2016:15:11:23 -0500] "GET /api/4/ HTTP/1.1" 404 571 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/53.0.2785.143 Safari/537.36"

"GET /api/4/ HTTP/1.1" 404

Means files need to be in /api/4/
Looks like your backend is not looking there or is not configured to serve files from there.

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nginx for Windows http://nginx-win.ecsds.eu/

It is an appliance and I do not have root access. Does that mean since I cannot set a URL base for it on the appliance end, I am at a dead end trying to get it to work with nginx?

What does this do:

location /app1 {
rewrite /app1/([^/]+) /$1 break;
proxy_pass https://192.168.1.2:8080/;
}

---
nginx for Windows http://nginx-win.ecsds.eu/

I think that is the same thing we tried before. It gets to the appliance, but the page is blank and the browser URL is redirected to https://192.168.1.2:8080/api/4/.

I changed the proxy pass line to https://192.168.1.2:8080/api/4/. I now can get to the web page externally, but login fails. I am guessing the pages at or after login or not in the /api/4/ folder or subfolders.