nginx reverse_proxy with axis camera - default rewrite not working - nginx

Question

I've got an AXIS camera sitting behind my firewall.
If you cURL to the camera's IP, it wants to redirect you to /view/index.shtml via a meta refresh.
I'm trying to access the camera via webserver-IP/camera. My nginx config is simple - it looks like this:
location /camera {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.205:80/;
proxy_redirect default;
}
This however is not working - the redirect isn't happening. When I access webserver-IP/camera, it redirects me to webserver-IP/view instead of webserver-IP/camera/view.
Any ideas?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Try replacing your proxy_redirect with this line
proxy_redirect http://192.168.0.205:80/; http://192.168.0.205:80/camera/;
I don't know what your Location header says exactly, but you should get the idea, replace the IP with a hostname or whatever the redirect is trying to take you, you're simply telling nginx to append /camera to whatever redirect the website asks you to do

Answer 2

The problem is that the html, js, and css returned by the axis camera all assumes that you are accessing it from a URL like http://192.168.0.205/ (Just the scheme and host, no additional /camera/ path)
If you look at the html you'll see stuff like:
<script src="/incl/prototypes.js?ver=5.80.1" language="javascript" type="text/javascript"></script>
In short, you need to re-write the content you are serving to reflect the new URL you'll be requesting it from: http://192.168.0.205/camera/
You can do that using a sub filter:
location /camera {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.205:80/;
proxy_redirect default;
# nevuh fuhget where you from
sub_filter_once off;
sub_filter_types *;
sub_filter '"/' '"/camera/';
sub_filter '=/' '=/camera/';
}
Depending on your camera, you may have to play around with and add more sub_filter lines to catch all of the places where the base path is incorrectly pointing to /. Also, this is basically parsing html/js/cs with REGEX so beware.