mjc / frontend

An experimental NGINX-based reverse proxy for all Turing apps

Purpose

Turing will achieve higher Google rank by having all content under subfolders rather than subdomains.

• http://turing.io/apply instead of http://apply.turing.io
• http://turing.io/tutorials instead of http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com

But we don't want to merge these into one app. Instead we can use the NGINX buildpack on Heroku to serve as a reverse proxy across multiple apps.

Status

This is currently a proof of concept and it can be deployed on Heroku.

However, the applications which are proxied to serve their assets based on the root (ie /images/header.png) where they need to be generated with the subdirectory (ie /apply/images/header.png).

It's not clear if it's possible/easy to configure Rails to dynamically determine whether the current request has come by way of the proxy or the app is being accessed directly. If it's not, then this is a destructive change to the child apps as they'll no longer function correctly when accessed directly.

A blog post with the relevent Rails config options is here.