Executing Liferay behing a Nginx reverse proxy

Question

I am trying to test the last version of Liferay (Liferay 7.0-ga4) and install it behind a reverse proxy (nginx). I am using docker and docker compose for testing purposes, and I create a dummy domain docker.domain.com.

Liferay works fine if I access directly to its url and no reverse proxy is configured.

Also, I have success to install Liferay behind the nginx server if I use the root location:

location / {
   proxy_pass http://liferay:8080;
   proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
   proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
   proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}

Where liferay in the proxy_pass section is the name of the docker container linked in the docker compose. And Liferay's options:

web.server.host=docker.domain.com
web.server.protocol=http
web.server.http.port=80

To configure the reverse proxy in Liferay. The results is correct if I type http://docker.domain.com/:

I can login, accept terms and conditions, ... everything seems fine.

But when I use a location that is not root (i.e /lifeay), I have issues with links, images, and css in general.

With a configuraion in nginx similar to:

location /liferay {
   proxy_pass http://liferay:8080;
   proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
   proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
   proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}

And adding as suggested here to Liferay's configuration:

portal.proxy.path=/liferay

When accessing to http://docker.domain.com/liferay all url are messed up and CSS are not shown. Here I attach an screenshot of the final result:

It is interesting the line

http://docker.domain.com/liferay/liferay

Where "liferay" appears two times in the url. Some errors appear at the liferay's tomcat log:

12:48:29,019 WARN  [http-nio-8080-exec-3][code_jsp:172] {code="404", msg="/liferay/o/mentions-web/css/mentions.css", uri=/liferay/o/mentions-web/css/mentions.css}
12:48:29,021 WARN  [http-nio-8080-exec-8][code_jsp:172] {code="404", msg="/liferay/o/frontend-css-web/main.css", uri=/liferay/o/frontend-css-web/main.css}
 ....

Obviously some files are not found. I have created a simple example with docker github to test it only spending a few minutes if somebody is interested. Still, I am pretty sure that something is missing in my Liferay configuration, but I am not able to figure out what. At least I am not able to find any clue in the official documentation.

Answer 1

Seems that the problem was with the the trailing slash in proxy_pass. It is what makes a difference. Following this example, the nginx configuration file will be:

   location /liferay {
     return 302 /liferay/;
   }

   location /liferay/ {
     proxy_pass http://liferay:8080/;
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }

And now seems that Liferay CSS and URLs are correctly working.