How to setup an Nginx reverse proxy with a SSL certificate in XWIKI

Hey everyone,  Tonight I continue my previous post of the complete setup of xwiki. This post is about how to setup  Nginx as a reverse proxy with an SSL certificate.

Before moving further we consider that xwiki runs on the server( EC2 server) with a domain name called example.in

To create a custom domain name using AWS you can follow this link:- https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/get-a-domain/

By default, Tomcat 9 works on port 8080, and you can only visit your XWiki site from the same port. If you want to facilitate visitors' access by removing the port number part, you can install Nginx as a reverse proxy between XWiki and visitors.

Step 1, Install Nginx using apt:

sudo apt install nginx -y

Step 2, Setup Nginx as a reverse proxy by modifying its default site configurations:
cd /etc/nginx/sites-available 

sudo mv default default.bak 

sudo vi default

Step 3, Edit the file

server { 

listen 0.0.0.0:80; 

proxy_request_buffering off; 

proxy_buffering off; 

location / { 

    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;

    proxy_redirect off;

    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-Host $server_name; 

    } 

}

Save and quit

Step 4, Start the Nginx service and set it to automatically start on system startup:

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service 

sudo systemctl enable nginx.service

Step 5,  Modify the UFW firewall rules accordingly:

sudo ufw allow 80 

sudo ufw deny 8080 

sudo ufw reload

Step 6, Verify

So just check the port  number 80 is working or not on the browser

example.in:80

Also, check port number 8080 is not working 

example.in:8080

Step 7, Add SSL certificate

First, download the Let’s Encrypt client, certbot:

apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install certbot 

apt-get install python-certbot-nginx

Step 8,  Obtain the SSL/TLS Certificate

The NGINX plug‑in for certbot takes care of reconfiguring NGINX and reloading its configuration whenever necessary.

1. Run the following command to generate certificates with the NGINX plug‑in: sudo certbot --nginx -d example.in -d example.in
2. Respond to prompts from certbot to configure your HTTPS settings, which involves entering your email address and agreeing to the Let’s Encrypt terms of service.
3. certbot generates a message indicating that certificate generation was successful and specifying the location of the certificate on your server. When certificate generation completes, NGINX reloads with the new settings.
4. If you look at domain‑name.conf, you see that certbot has modified it:

Now check the URL https://example.in

Hope you enjoyed my blog post.😎