Niko's Project Corner

Publishing internal services behind a NAT

Even in desk­top ap­pli­ca­tions it is be­com­ing more and more com­mon to provide a HTTP based APIs or full user in­ter­faces. For ex­am­ple Bit­Tor­rent's μTor­rent and Bit­Tor­rent Sync don't have any built-in UI, and in­stead users just head with their pre­ferred in­ter­net browser to http://lo­cal­host:8080 or http://lo­cal­host:8888. How­ever they typ­ically lack HTTPS en­cryp­tion and each port needs to be con­fig­ured to the NAT router in­di­vid­ually. This so­lu­tion uses a Ng­inx in­stance on a vir­tual ma­chine to provide a HTTPS re­verse proxy to all these ser­vices in a sin­gle port un­der dif­fer­ent sub-do­mains.