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HAProxy Proxying

✋ Caution

The content of this page has not been updated to Strapi v5 yet.

As Strapi does not handle SSL directly and hosting a Node.js service on the "edge" network is not a secure solution it is recommended that you use some sort of proxy application such as Nginx, Apache, HAProxy, Traefik, or others. The following documentation provides some sample configurations for HAProxy, naturally these configs may not suit all environments and you will likely need to adjust them to fit your needs.

Configuration​

The following examples are acting as an "SSL termination" proxy, meaning that HAProxy is only accepting the requests on SSL and proxying to other backend services such as Strapi or other web servers. HAProxy cannot serve static content and as such it is usually used to handle multi-server deployments in a failover or load-balance situation. The following examples are based around everything existing on the same server, but could easily be tweaked for multi-server deployments.

Strapi server​

In order to take full advantage of a proxied Strapi application, Strapi should be configured so it's aware of the upstream proxy. Like with the below configurations there are 3 matching examples. Additional information can be found in the server configuration and admin configuration documentations.

✏️ Note

These examples use the default API Prefix of /api. This can be changed without the need to directly modify the Nginx configuration (see the API prefix documentation).

✋ Caution

If the url key is changed in the ./config/admin.js or ./config/server.js files, the admin panel needs to be rebuilt with yarn build or npm run build.

Subdomain Strapi configuration​

  • Example domain: api.example.com
  • Example admin: api.example.com/admin
  • Example API: api.example.com/api
  • Example uploaded files (local provider): api.example.com/uploads
path: ./config/server.js

module.exports = ({ env }) => ({
  host: env('HOST', '0.0.0.0'),
  port: env.int('PORT', 1337),
  url: 'https://api.example.com',
});

HAProxy​

The following examples are either proxying all requests directly to Strapi or are splitting requests between Strapi and some other backend web server such as Nginx, Apache, or others.

The following are 2 example HAProxy configurations:

  • Sub-domain based such as api.example.com
  • subfolder based with both the API and Admin on the same subfolder such as example.com/test/api and example.com/test/admin
✏️ Subfolder split is not supported

Using subfolder split (eg: https://example.com/dashboard and https://example.com/api) are not supported nor recommended with Strapi. It's advised that you either use subdomains (eg: https://api.example.com) or subfolder unified (eg: https://example.com/strapi/dashboard and https://example.com/strapi/api).

✋ HAProxy SSL Support

If you are not familiar with HAProxy and using SSL certificates on the bind directive, you should combine your SSL cert, key, and any CA files into a single .pem package and use it's path in the bind directive. For more information see HAProxy's bind documentation. Most Let's Encrypt clients do not generate a file like this so you may need custom "after issue" scripts to do this for you.

Subdomain​

This configuration is using a subdomain dedicated to Strapi only. It will redirect normal HTTP traffic over to SSL and proxies all requests (both API and admin) to the Strapi server running on the server.

  • Example domain: api.example.com
  • Example admin panel: api.example.com/admin
  • Example API: api.example.com/api
  • Example uploaded Files (local provider): api.example.com/uploads
# path: /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg

global
        log /dev/log    local0
        log /dev/log    local1 notice
        chroot /var/lib/haproxy
        stats socket /run/haproxy/admin.sock mode 660 level admin expose-fd listeners
        stats timeout 30s
        user haproxy
        group haproxy
        daemon

        # Default SSL material locations
        ca-base /etc/ssl/certs
        crt-base /etc/ssl/private

        # See: https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/#server=haproxy&server-version=2.0.3&config=intermediate
        ssl-default-bind-ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA3$
        ssl-default-bind-ciphersuites TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256:TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
        ssl-default-bind-options ssl-min-ver TLSv1.2 no-tls-tickets

defaults
        log     global
        mode    http
        option  httplog
        option  dontlognull
        timeout connect 5000
        timeout client  50000
        timeout server  50000
        errorfile 400 /etc/haproxy/errors/400.http
        errorfile 403 /etc/haproxy/errors/403.http
        errorfile 408 /etc/haproxy/errors/408.http
        errorfile 500 /etc/haproxy/errors/500.http
        errorfile 502 /etc/haproxy/errors/502.http
        errorfile 503 /etc/haproxy/errors/503.http
        errorfile 504 /etc/haproxy/errors/504.http

# Everything above this line is HAProxy defaults

frontend api.example.com
        bind *:80
        bind *:443 ssl crt /path/to/your/cert+key+ca.pem
        http-request redirect scheme https unless { ssl_fc }
        default_backend strapi-backend

backend strapi-backend
        server local 127.0.0.1:1337

Redirecting landing page to admin panel​

If you do not wish to have the default landing page mounted on / you can create a custom middleware using the sample code below to automatically redirect to your admin panel.

✋ Caution

This sample configuration expects that the admin panel is accessible on /admin. If you used one of the above configurations to change this to /dashboard you will also need to adjust this sample configuration.

./config/middlewares.js
module.exports = ({ env }) => [
    // ...
    { resolve: './src/middlewares/admin-redirect' },
];

./src/middlewares/admin-redirect.js
module.exports = (_config, { strapi }) => {
    const redirects = ['/', '/index.html'].map((path) => ({
        method: 'GET',
        path,
        handler: (ctx) => ctx.redirect('/admin'),
        config: { auth: false },
    }));

    strapi.server.routes(redirects);
};