Configuring nginx for both Rails and Tomcat

This is easy to do but I had a few missteps in setting up nginx with both Rails and Tomcat so it is worthwhile documenting what I did. I have two cooking and recipe web portals, an older one written in Java (CJsKitchen.com) and a newer one that uses the USDA nutritional database that runs on Rails (CookingSpace.com). These are low volume sites so I wanted to run both on a single inexpensive VPS.

Usually I run a few virtual domains on one Tomcat instance (requires a simple mapping in conf/server.xml between virtual domain names and subdirectories of $TOMCAT/webapps) but in this case, I only need to add a single virtual domain for my Java web app on a system that is already configured for Rails. So, no changes to server.xml are required and I deployed to $TOMCAT/webapps/ROOT. Then, the only thing left to do was add a section in my nginx.conf file for Tomcat running on port 8080:

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  cjskitchen.com www.csjkitchen.com;
        root /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT;

        access_log  off;
        rewrite_log on;

        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;
        }
    }

Both my wife and I are very good cooks, and writing two cooking/recipe web apps has been a fun hobby.