Nginx reverse proxy to node application API - node.js

Question

I've got an NGINX reverse proxy on my server handling requests for http://apcompdoc.com. It listens on port 80, and can successfully return the Vue Dist, however, I have a backend node API running on port 8081 and another node process running on port 8082. The user never directly requests anything on 8082, but rather the process on 8081 sometimes requests the process on 8082, so I'm assuming I never have to even expose that to Nginx at all, but I'm not too sure. However, the main problem is that the API is never reached I believe. I have it so that when you hit the endpoint http://apcompdoc.com/api/* it should proxy over to the node process. I am using PM2 to keep the process alive and monitor it, and am assured it's running. This is my NGINX apcompdoc.com config file:
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
server_name: apcompdoc.com www.apcompdoc.com;
charset utf-8;
root /var/www/apcompdoc/dist;
index index.html index.htm;
# Always serve index.html for any request;
location / {
root /var/www/apcompdoc/dist;
try_files $uri /index.html;
}
location /api/ {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8081;
}
error_log /var/log/nginx/vue-app-error.log;
access_log /var/log/nginx/vue-app-access.log;
}
I am trying to get all requests to my API at /api/* to get redirected to the API at localhost:8081 and then returned to the user. I saw something about redirecting the proxy back, do I have to do that? I also don't know if I have to do /api/* in the NGINX config file.
I'm really new to NGINX but I just want the requests to http://apcompdoc.com/api/* to be redirected to the node process on port 8081.

Answer 1

Bad or good practice, I'm not sure, but I always defining my backend as upstream.
For example, your file will look like this:
upstream nodeprocess {
server localhost:8081;
}
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
server_name: apcompdoc.com www.apcompdoc.com;
charset utf-8;
root /var/www/apcompdoc/dist;
index index.html index.htm;
# Always serve index.html for any request;
location / {
root /var/www/apcompdoc/dist;
try_files $uri /index.html;
}
location ^~ /api {
proxy_pass http://nodeprocess;
}
error_log /var/log/nginx/vue-app-error.log;
access_log /var/log/nginx/vue-app-access.log;
}
Please note I added ^~ in the location of the api and removed the trailing /