Deploy Firely Server on Nginx on Linux

About Nginx

NGINX is a popular open source web server. It can act as a reverse proxy server for TCP, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer and a HTTP cache. You can find the documentation for the Nginx server at https://nginx.org/en/docs/.

Prerequisites

The following linux distribution are supported: Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, SLES
Install .Net Core on the machine (see https://www.microsoft.com/net/learn/get-started/linuxubuntu)
Install Nginx sudo apt-get install nginx

Start Kestrel Firely Server

Download the binaries for Firely Server (see Getting Started), open a terminal console and start the Firely Server process by using: dotnet Vonk.Server.dll. You should be able to reach to home page at http://localhost:4080 (or a different port if you changed the default configurations)

Configure Nginx as a reverse proxy

To configure Nginx as a reverse proxy to forward requests to our ASP.NET Core application, modify /etc/nginx/sites-available/default. Open it in a text editor, and replace the contents with the following:

server {
    listen 80;
    # Match incoming requests with the following path and forward them to
    # the location of the Kestrel server.
    # See http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#location
    location / {
        #This should match the location where you deployed the Firely Server binaries with the Kestrel server.
        #This can be on the same machine as the Nginx server or on a separate dedicated machine
        proxy_pass http://localhost:4080;
        # The Kestrel web server we are forwarding requests to only speaks HTTP 1.1.
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        # Adds the 'Connection: keep-alive' HTTP header.
        proxy_set_header Connection keep-alive;
        # Forwards the Host HTTP header.
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }
}

Now you can run the Firely Server.

Configuration

To configure the Firely Server, you can use the appsettings.json file (see Configuring Firely Server).
To configure Nginx you need to add extra options to the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default or to the nginx.conf file.
To monitor the application you can use systemd and create a service for starting, stopping and managing the process.