Configure nginx for jboss/tomcat

You can check my blog post on http://www.componentix.com/blog/18. It may be interesting to you, as example includes few additional tweaks as caching content only for not logged in users and redirecting for different languages.

Another way to do it like it's described in http://wiki.nginx.org/LikeApache wiki page. server { listen myhost:80; server_name myhost; location / { root /path/to/myapp/public; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_pass http://myapp:8080; } } I have as well tested it as well with /myapp instead of root and works as well, putting location /myapp and proxypass http://myapp:8080/myapp; As well, this configuration maps everything to the Java application, which is useful when you have nice URLs that are mapped by an MVC framework like Struts.

You don't have to use mod_jk, you can use mod_proxy, i.e. pass the traffic through over HTTP instead of AJP. If nginx has proxy ability, that should work just as well.

There is now a pretty fresh ajp_module for nginex. I dont have experience with it, but I think the session stickyness and especially the persistent backend connections are quite helpfull for Tomcat. Both methods (http proxy or ajp proxy) are sadly inflexible for longrunning queries (comet) or large file transfers (uploads). https://github.com/yaoweibin/nginx_ajp_module#readme lighthttp BTW has a general proxy module which can handle FCGI,HTTP,CGIS and AJP13 encoding. This looks like a better approach (but I think from reading it has the same limitations with regards to untypical long/large request/response patterns). http://redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/1/Docs:ModProxyCore