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Reverse proxy - Lighttpd

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In situations where you have existing web sites on your server, you may find it useful to run Jenkins (or the servlet container that Jenkins runs in) behind Lighttpd. This allows you to bind Jenkins to the part of a bigger website that you may have or centralize the TLS termination in a single place. This section discusses some of the approaches for doing this.

The mod_proxy works by making Lighttpd perform as a "reverse proxy". This means when a request arrives for certain URLs, Lighttpd becomes a proxy and forwards that request to Jenkins, then forwards the response from Jenkins back to the client.

There are two alternatives to configure Jenkins with Lighttpd. Select the technique that best meets your needs:

By default, Lighttpd will force the URL normalization, thus mismatching the headers used by an internal Jenkins reverse proxy test. This results in showing the message It appears that your reverse proxy setup is broken on the manage page. To avoid this, explicit disable the option url-path-2f-decode.

By host

In the configuration below there is no context path for Jenkins URL.

When a request for the domain jenkins.example.com arrives, Lighttpd proxies this request to Jenkins.

server.http-parseopts = (
  "url-path-2f-decode" => "disable"
)

server.modules += ( "mod_proxy" )

$HTTP["host"] == "jenkins.example.com" {
  proxy.balance = "hash"
  proxy.server = (
    "" => (
      "jenkins" => (
        "host" => "127.0.0.1",
        "port" => "8080"
      )
    )
  )
}

This assumes that you run Jenkins on port 8080.

By path

In the configuration below there is a specific path /jenkins for Jenkins. This path should be configured in Lighttpd with $HTTP["url"]. In Jenkins, set the context path by modifying the jenkins.xml configuration file and adding --prefix=/jenkins (or similar) to the <arguments> entry.

When a request is made to, for example http://localhost/jenkins, Lighttpd proxies this request to Jenkins.

server.http-parseopts = (
  "url-path-2f-decode" => "disable"
)

server.modules += ( "mod_proxy" )

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/jenkins(.*)$" {
  proxy.balance = "hash"
  proxy.server = (
    "" => (
      "jenkins" => (
        "host" => "127.0.0.1",
        "port" => 8080
      )
    )
  )
}

This assumes that you run Jenkins on port 8080.

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