Port-forwarding to a local domain using socat - networking

Question

I'm trying to setup port forwarding from localhost to a local server using socat. The server is available via http://my-local-domain.
Here is what I tried:
socat -d -d tcp-listen:8081,reuseaddr,fork tcp:my-local-domain:80
When I open the browser and go to http://localhost:8081, I see my original localhost page, not the page when I navigate to my-local-domain.
How does one create port-forwarding to a local domain using socat?

Answer 1

I found that I'm not able to use Port 80 because the Host appears as localhost to NGINX, and so localhost serves the request [which would explain the original issue].
You can verify this by:
Opening nginx.conf
Adding ..."Host=$host"... to the log_format
Tailing the access logs [tail -f /usr/local/nginx/logs/access.log]
You'll notice that Host is always localhost, and so localhost serves the request.
The way to solve this is to change the Host info from localhost to my-local-server:
Localhost:8081 --> [change Host info] --> my-local-server:80
The way I found to do this was to create a proxy via Node.JS [as a go-between] as follows:
Create proxy.js
Copy the contents of the code from this gist and paste into proxy.js
Run the following command in the terminal to create proxy to web server:
PORT_LISTEN=8091 PORT_TARGET=80 HOST_TARGET="my-local-server" HOST_ORIGIN="my-local-server" node proxy.js
Run socat to proxy
socat -d -d tcp-listen:8081,reuseaddr,fork tcp:localhost:8091
So now we have the following:
Localhost:8081 --> Localhost:8091 --> my-local-server:80
This is what worked.