Can nginx be used as a reverse proxy for a backend websocket server?

Question

We\'re working on a Ruby on Rails app that needs to take advantage of html5 websockets. At the moment, we have two separate \"servers\" so to speak: our main app running on

Answer 1

I use nginx to reverse proxy to a comet style server with long polling connections and it works great. Make sure you configure proxy_send_timeout and proxy_read_timeout to appropriate values. Also make sure your back-end server that nginx is proxying to supports http 1.0 because I don't think nginx's proxy module does http 1.1 yet.

Just to clear up some confusion in a few of the answers: Keepalive allows a client to reuse a connection to send another HTTP request. It does not have anything to do with long polling or holding connections open until an event occurs which is what the original question was asking about. So it doesn't matter than nginx's proxy module only supports HTTP 1.0 which does not have keepalive.