DEV Community

Ambassador
Ambassador

Posted on • Originally published at getambassador.io

1

Host a Reverse Proxy in Seconds

Need a publicly accessible reverse proxy? Want to skip testing with localhost? Blackbird has an easy solution.
Blackbird API Development

Setting up the Proxy

First let’s configure a simple reverse proxy with nginx using the following nginx.conf:

server {
listen 80;
location / {
proxy_pass "https://httpbin.org/";
}
}

All requests sent to this server will proxy out to httpbin.org — a nice tool for developing and testing this proxy with downstream servers/APIs.

Next, we’ll define a simple Dockerfile that uses our ngnix configuration to build an image:

`
FROM nginx:latest

COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf`

EXPOSE 80

Hosting the Proxy with Blackbird

After installing the Blackbird CLI, we can publicly host this reverse proxy with a Blackbird deployment:

blackbird deployment create proxy -d Dockerfile -c .
✔ input validated
✔ environment is ready
✔ no matching mock instance found
✔ image successfully built
✔ image successfully pushed
✔ checking existing deployments
✔ creating application for deployment
✔ application deployment created
+-------+------------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| NAME | TYPE | STATUS | URL |
+-------+------------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| proxy | deployment | Ready | https://matts-org-a0696.blackbird-relay.a8r.io/proxy/ |
+-------+------------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+

Blackbird gave us a public host that is running our reverse proxy in a container - let’s try it out:

curl --request POST -d '{"message":"hello"}' \
https://matts-org-a0696.blackbird-relay.a8r.io/proxy/post

{
"args": {},
"data": "{\"message\":\"hello\"}",
"files": {},
"form": {},
"headers": {
"Accept": "*/*",
"Content-Length": "19",
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Host": "httpbin.org",
"User-Agent": "curl/8.6.0"
},
"json": {
"message": "hello"
},
"url": "https://httpbin.org/post"
}

Just like that, our reverse proxy is live and hosted 🚀

Happy proxying!

Sentry image

See why 4M developers consider Sentry, “not bad.”

Fixing code doesn’t have to be the worst part of your day. Learn how Sentry can help.

Learn more

Top comments (0)

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay