i want to host two small websites, both made with strapi backend and react frontend, on my server which is a digital ocean droplet.
I already configured nginx in order to work for one of the websites and everything is working correctly. I can access strapi from site1.com/dashboard and my queries point to site1.com/api/graphql. I followed some tutorials for that. Here are the nginx files i added:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/site1.com:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/site1.com/react;
# Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
server_name site1.com www.site1.com;
location /api/ {
rewrite ^/api/(.*)$ /$1 break;
proxy_pass http://strapi;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
proxy_pass_request_headers on;
}
location /dashboard {
proxy_pass http://strapi/dashboard;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
proxy_pass_request_headers on;
}
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
}
file /etc/nginx/conf.d/upstream.conf:
upstream strapi {
server 127.0.0.1:1337;
}
What i now want to do is to deploy another website to the same server and configure nginx to serve it as well (on another domain, for example site2.com).
So i added the nginx virtual server file for the second website, copying the first one and changing the domain name and root directory. The site 2 frontend is now working correctly and accessible on its domain.
However when i start the site 2 strapi instance it says the port 1337 is already in use (obviously, it is used by site 1 strapi instance that is running with pm2). So i changed the port in strapi config to be 1338 (is it ok?) but now i don't know what do to in nginx in order to serve the two different strapi instances on different domains.
The hostname you are using for the proxy_pass directive is the upstream name you defined in the separate config file. This is basically an indirection to one or more real backends. In your case that's the application running on port 1337 on the same machine. It could also be a list of external domains where nginx takes care to distribute the load to.
Your approach with additional virtual hosts already looks good. The frontend that already "works" under site2 is probably the old instance served under the new domain if your proxy_pass directive still points to http://strapi for site2 (which probably still resolves to `localhost:1337).
As you already mentioned, a second instance of the backend needs to run on a different port. The port number you use is not really important as you will control this with your upstream configuration. Just make sure to not use a port number below 1024 (which requires root permissions), don't conflict with other processes on the system (you will notice) and as best practice, don't use port numbers that are default for some other protocols (maybe check this list).
To fix your setup, just define a second upstream like the first one but pointing to the new url e.g. localhost:1338 and then reference this new name in the proxy_pass directive of site2.
Technically, with just one backend per upstream, you could also skip the upstream part completely and reference the URL directly in the proxy_pass directives, but using a shorthand name can also support readability of your configuration.