I am having some problems with my Nginx reverse proxy. I'm running a web application on port 8010 that accepts and serves two different web sites from that port. (As far as I know, there's no way to serve them on different ports, with the server I'm using.) I have different host names for each which are pointed to the same IP address. I'll call them name1.domain.com:8010 and name2.domain.com:8010. Both of these successfully resolve to the appropriate web root within my web application, and the appropriate web site is rendered, IF I include the port number. I want to use Nginx as a reverse proxy however, so that I'll have one place to configure my SSL settings and redirect from old hostnames.

I set up my proxy in nginx two different ways, and neither of them consistently resolve to the right website:

1: I setup one upstream server and accessed it through proxy_pass from both server definitions:

upstream my_server{
server 127.0.0.1:8010;
}

server {
listen 80;
server_name name1.domain.com;

location / {
root /location_1
proxy_pass http://my_server;
...
}
}

server {
listen 80;
server_name name2.domain.com;

location / {
root /location_2
proxy_pass http://my_server;
...
}
}

Please note that I'm just trying to get the reverse proxy to work. Once I do that, I'll add SSL requirements, and all the necessary rewrites to make sure people are redirected to our secured interface.

The second way I tried this was to create a different upstream for each website, using the full DNS names for each, and then calling the appropriate upstream proxy from each server definition:

upstream name1_server{
server name1.domain.com:8010;
}

upstream name2_server{
server name2.domain.com:8010;
}

... (the same as above, except replacing my_server with name1/2_server at proxy_pass)

Both ways gave the same results. After restarting my web application and nginx (just to make sure I start from a clean slate), both name1.domain.comand name2.domain.com resolve to the name1:domain.com:8010 website. However, if I go to name2.domain.com:8010, then both name1.domain.com and name2.domain.com will resolve to that website. Going to name1.domain.com:8010 then causes both portless addresses to resolve there, until I visit name2.domain.com:8010 directly again.

Obviously, I don't understand the relationship between how nginx deals with upstream declarations and how that passes along to my web application. Any help would be appreciated.