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. In the following examples you will find 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.
In 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.
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 following 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.
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(opens new window). 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.
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
This configuration is using a subfolder dedicated to Strapi only. It will redirect normal HTTP traffic over to SSL and proxies the front end to localhost:8080, but proxies all Strapi requests on the example.com/test sub-path to the locally running Strapi application.
✋ CAUTION
HAProxy cannot serve static content, the following example is proxying front-end traffic to some other web server running on the localhost port 8080.
Example domain: example.com/test
Example admin panel: example.com/test/admin
Example API: example.com/test/api
Example uploaded Files (local provider): example.com/test/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 5000timeout client 50000timeout 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 example.com
bind *:80
bind *:443 ssl crt /path/to/your/cert+key+ca.pem
http-request redirect scheme https unless { ssl_fc }
acl test path_beg /test
use_backend strapi-backend iftest
default_backend default-backend
backend default-backend
# HAProxy -cannot- serve static content on it's own# This example is relaying traffic to some other backend webserver
server somewebserver 127.0.0.1:8080
backend strapi-backend
http-request set-path "%[path,regsub(^/test/?,/)]"
server local127.0.0.1:1337
If you do not wish to have the default landing page mounted on / you can create a custom ./public/index.html using the following sample code 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.
