NGINX configuration for gunicorn and prerender.io - nginx

Question

I am currently serving my website using Nginx and Gunicorn.
In particular, Nginx is serving static files and Gunicorn is serving rest-api.
This is my current Nginx configuration:
worker_processes 2;
user nobody nogroup;
# 'user nobody nobody;' for systems with 'nobody' as a group instead
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024; # increase if you have lots of clients
accept_mutex on; # set to 'on' if nginx worker_processes > 1
# 'use epoll;' to enable for Linux 2.6+
# 'use kqueue;' to enable for FreeBSD, OSX
}
http {
include mime.types;
# fallback in case we can't determine a type
default_type application/octet-stream;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log combined;
sendfile on;
proxy_connect_timeout 300;
proxy_send_timeout 300;
proxy_read_timeout 300;
send_timeout 300;
upstream app_server {
# fail_timeout=0 means we always retry an upstream even if it failed
# to return a good HTTP response
# for UNIX domain socket setups
# server unix:/tmp/gunicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
# for a TCP configuration
server 127.0.0.1:8181 fail_timeout=0;
}
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name www.miralytics.social;
return 301 https://www.miralytics.social$request_uri;
}
server {
# if no Host match, close the connection to prevent host spoofing
listen 443 default ssl;
ssl_certificate /certificates/fullchain1.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /certificates/privkey1.pem;
server_name www.miralytics.social;
gzip on;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/x-javascript image/png image/jpeg application/javascript application/octet-stream application/json;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_min_length 0;
gzip_comp_level 9;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
proxy_connect_timeout 600;
proxy_send_timeout 600;
proxy_read_timeout 600;
send_timeout 600;
keepalive_timeout 5;
# path for static files
root /home/edge7/UIBackend/dist;
location ~ ^/(images|javascript|js|css|flash|media|static)/ {
root /home/edge7/UIBackend/dist;
expires 1d;
}
location /auth/register {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
# we don't want nginx trying to do something clever with
# redirects, we set the Host: header above already.
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8181;
}
location /auth/login {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
# we don't want nginx trying to do something clever with
# redirects, we set the Host: header above already.
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8181;
}
location / {
# checks for static file, if not found proxy to app
try_files $uri #proxy_to_app;
}
location #proxy_to_app {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8181;
}
add_header Cache-Control no-cache; #(no cache for testing reasons)
}
}
Here the official prerender configuration for Nginx, but as you can see it does not fit my current configuration because I already have #proxy_to_app.
Has anyone experience with this?

Answer 1

You can just modify your config a little bit so where you have this:
location / {
# checks for static file, if not found proxy to app
try_files $uri #proxy_to_app;
}
You would want to change that to:
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Prerender-Token YOUR_TOKEN;
set $prerender 0;
if ($http_user_agent ~* "googlebot|bingbot|yandex|baiduspider|twitterbot|facebookexternalhit|rogerbot|linkedinbot|embedly|quora link preview|showyoubot|outbrain|pinterest|slackbot|vkShare|W3C_Validator") {
set $prerender 1;
}
if ($args ~ "_escaped_fragment_") {
set $prerender 1;
}
if ($http_user_agent ~ "Prerender") {
set $prerender 0;
}
if ($uri ~* "\.(js|css|xml|less|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|pdf|doc|txt|ico|rss|zip|mp3|rar|exe|wmv|doc|avi|ppt|mpg|mpeg|tif|wav|mov|psd|ai|xls|mp4|m4a|swf|dat|dmg|iso|flv|m4v|torrent|ttf|woff|svg|eot)") {
set $prerender 0;
}
#resolve using Google's DNS server to force DNS resolution and prevent caching of IPs
resolver 8.8.8.8;
if ($prerender = 1) {
#setting prerender as a variable forces DNS resolution since nginx caches IPs and doesnt play well with load balancing
set $prerender "service.prerender.io";
rewrite .* /$scheme://$host$request_uri? break;
proxy_pass http://$prerender;
}
# checks for static file, if not found proxy to app
try_files $uri #proxy_to_app;
}