jHipster dev profile reverse proxy? - jhipster

Question

I created a skeleton app with jhipster and added some entitles with import-jdl. Now I'm trying to run the dev profile and it hosts it on localhost:8080, which is fine. But I want to proxy it to the public Internet through nginx and put it behind SSL.
Now if I were using Tomcat as an app server, I could set the proxyHost property on the Connector to tell the app server what its public-facing URL is so it generates URLs for the client properly.
But I don't know what app server jhipster uses for the dev profile or how to configure it.

Answer 1

There are a few ways you can go to solve your problem,
The most simplest one is to reverse proxy using nginx, like this:
server {
listen [::]:80;
listen 80;
server_name your-domain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/your-app-access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/your-app-error.log;
return 301 https://$host:443$request_uri;
}
server {
listen [::]:443 ssl;
listen 443 ssl;
server_name your-domain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/your-app-access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/your-app-error.log;
ssl_certificate /path/to/ssl/server.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /path/to/ssl/server.key;
keepalive_timeout 70;
add_header Alternate-Protocol 443:npn-spdy/2;
location / {
proxy_pass http://jhipster;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Port $server_port;
proxy_set_header X-Request-Start $msec;
}
}
upstream jhipster {
server 127.0.0.1:8080;
}
which should work on every nginx.
This expects your app running at port 8080 at localhost, what is the case when you start it locally. This furthermore requires you to install java and more stuff on your server.
A better way is to use the docker option to create docker images. There are a lot of ways to handle with docker images, like public repository as DockerHub as well as private solutions, like GitLab Container registry. At least you can do a trick by serving the registry docker image at some server with ssl, to use this for private registry.
Then you can at least deploy your app to the same nginx configuration as written above, directing traffic to a running docker container. With this, you only need a arbitrary linux distribution with docker and nginx running.
To gain the power of CI/CD systems, you can deploy these images to complex systems like kubernetes, but also to docker swarm (+ Docker Shipyard), or to smaller and easier to setup solutions like Deis or Dokku. You can read this article, which guides you through a setup of GitLab + GitLab CI + Registry + Dokku, where you can deploy your JHipster application using git push origin master
note: I suggest not to use the dev profile in production. To keep update with your application logs, consider specific logback configuration or solutions as JHipster Console (ELK Stack)