Reverse proxy to your Raspberry Pi

Now that we have a network set up, let’s create a reverse proxy to send traffic from the cloud server to a web server running on the pi.

Web server on the pi #

We can run a simple web server using nginx on the pi to serve static content. Let’s assume we have some static files in a /public directory and a simple nginx config like this in default.conf:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name localhost;
  root /usr/share/nginx/html;

  location / {
    index index.html;
  }
}

We can start the docker container like this:

docker run \
  --rm \
  -v $(pwd)/public:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro \
  -v $(pwd)/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro \
  -p 8080:80 \
  —name origin-server \
  -d \
  nginx:latest

You should be able to point your browser directly at your pi now and see your static content at http://interwebs.local:8080

Reverse proxy in the cloud #

On the cloud server we will run another instance of nginx but set it up as a reverse proxy to our pi. Using the tin network we set up in the previous post, the pi should be accessible at 10.0.0.2. Create a nginx config file that sets up the reverse proxy:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name _;

  location / {
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_pass http://10.0.0.2:8080;
  }
}

Start the docker container like this:

docker run \
  --rm \
  -v $(pwd)/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro \
  -p 80:80 \
  —name reverse-proxy \
  -d \
  nginx:latest

Add a firewall rule #

By default, the firewall will block access to port 80, but we can open that up using ufw-docker to forward that traffic to our docker container:

sudo ufw-docker allow reverse-proxy

At this point you should be able to navigate to the ip address of your cloud server in a browser and have that traffic proxied to the web server running on your raspberry pi.

← Home