Proxying with nginx

You'll need the latest version of nginx (preferably something starting with 1.3.15 or 16; at the time of the writing of this page version 1.4.1 is the current stable).

To install the latest nginx you can go about 2 ways

• build it from source
• get a packaged-for-your-distro option (personal favorite)

Both options are document on the nginx wiki.

Enough with the intro stuff; now for the fun part. The part below can also be found on the and on the page nginx pages, but for me it actually worked with noVNC (and I was so happy I decided to document it real quick).

In nginx you need 2 items in your config:

1. Upstream IP + port to the websocketproxy.py server

upstream vnc_proxy {
    server 127.0.0.1:29876;
}

• A path to your base URL, where you want it to show up.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    <other_config>
 
    location /vncws/ {
          proxy_pass http://one_vnc;
          proxy_http_version 1.1;
          proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
          proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    }

    <other_config>
}

• You'll also need to add the noVNC HTML + JS code somewhere, and make it point to *example.com/vncws/**. You'll need :
• images folder
• include folder
• vnc.html or vnc_auto.html . I've used vnc_auto.html, but I had to provide it some special URL like /vnc/vnc_auto.html?host=example.com/vncws/&port=80&path=?token=vnc_token . This is used in OpenNebula, with another tool updating the tokens into the target folder that is handled by websocketproxy.py

Regarding the last method, I'll admit, it's somewhat not-very-general-and-more-custom. The first 2 steps should be general enough to help proxy the websocket part of noVNC through nginx [in fact, that's what's mostly needed]. Point 3. depends on how you use the HTML + JS code.