Reverse proxy with Nginx

Prerequisites

1. Nginx is installed and running on your server.
2. GitBucket is running on some port. The default is 8080.
3. Know what domain you want GitBucket running

Nginx uses a configuration structure for virtual hosts that looks like /etc/nginx/sites-available and /etc/nginx/sites-enabled. This is fairly self-explanatory: the sites-available directory is site configuration files that are available and may more or may not be enabled and sites-enabled are site configuration files which are live and Nginx is serving.

Configuration

1. Create a file like /etc/nginx/sites-available/gitbucket
2. Add the following to the file:

server {
    listen   80; # The default is 80 but this here if you want to change it.
    server_name gitbucket.example.com;
    
    location / {
        proxy_pass              http://localhost:8080;
        proxy_set_header        Host $host;
        proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_connect_timeout   150;
        proxy_send_timeout      100;
        proxy_read_timeout      100;
        proxy_buffers           4 32k;
        client_max_body_size    500m; # Big number is we can post big commits.
        client_body_buffer_size 128k;
    }
}

3. Make a symlink to sites-enabled. E.g.:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/gitbucket /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

4. Check the Nginx configuration nginx -t
5. If that returns no errors, restart your Nginx server.

Assets caching

To improve GitBucket performance, you should add the following configuration to enable assets caching:

server {
    ...
    location /assets/ {
        proxy_pass              http://localhost:8080/assets/;
        proxy_cache             cache;
        proxy_cache_key         $host$uri$is_args$args;
        proxy_cache_valid       200 301 302 1d;
        expires                 1d;
    }
}

If you have never configured the cache zone, add the following line to the top level of the Nginx configuration file.

proxy_cache_path /var/lib/nginx/cache levels=1:2 keys_zone=cache:512m inactive=1d  max_size=60g;