By Ruz
I am trying to set up an Nginx reverse proxy on my Ubuntu 22.04 Droplet. I need help configuring the proxy_pass directive to forward requests to my backend application running on port 3000. What are the recommended settings for headers and timeouts?
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Heya,
For a basic reverse proxy to a backend on port 3000, the core of it is a location block like this:
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Host $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_connect_timeout 60s;
proxy_send_timeout 60s;
proxy_read_timeout 60s;
}
The four X-Forwarded/Host headers are the important part. Without them your backend sees every request as coming from 127.0.0.1 and thinks it’s on plain HTTP, which breaks anything doing redirects or logging real client IPs. If your app uses websockets, add proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; and proxy_set_header Connection “upgrade”; in there too.
On timeouts, 60s is a sane default. Only bump proxy_read_timeout higher if you have genuinely long-running requests like large uploads or streaming responses, otherwise you just hold sockets open longer than you need to. Since you’re already on a DigitalOcean VPS, this runs fine on the smallest size for a single backend, so no need to size up for the proxy layer itself.
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