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codeinthehole
Asked: 2011-05-10 02:28:09 +0800 CST

How to get nginx to pass HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header to Apache

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Am using Nginx as a reverse proxy to an Apache server that uses HTTP Auth. For some reason, I can't get the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header through to Apache, it seems to get filtered out by Nginx. Hence, no requests can authenticate.

Note that the Basic auth is dynamic so I don't want to hard-code it in my nginx config.

My nginx config is:

server {

    listen   80;
    server_name  example.co.uk ;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.cdk-dev.tangentlabs.co.uk.log;

    gzip on;

    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_read_timeout 120;

    location / {
            proxy_pass http://localhost:81/;
    }

    location ~* \.(jpg|png|gif|jpeg|js|css|mp3|wav|swf|mov|doc|xls|ppt|docx|pptx|xlsx|swf)$ {
    if (!-f $request_filename) {
        break;
                proxy_pass http://localhost:81;
    }

            root /var/www/example;
    }
}

Anyone know why this is happening?

Update - turns out the problem was something I had overlooked in my original question: mod_wsgi. The site in question here is a Django site, and it turns out that Apache does get the auth variables passed through, however mod_wsgi filters them out.

The resolution is to use:

WSGIPassAuthorization On

See http://www.arnebrodowski.de/blog/508-Django,-mod_wsgi-and-HTTP-Authentication.html for more details

django mod-wsgi nginx wsgi

1 Answers

  1. I'm not sure this will work, but try adding this:

    proxy_pass_request_headers on;
proxy_no_cache $cookie_nocache  $arg_nocache$arg_comment;
proxy_no_cache $http_pragma     $http_authorization;
proxy_cache_bypass $cookie_nocache $arg_nocache $arg_comment;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_pragma $http_authorization;

    If that doesn't work try this too:

    proxy_set_header HTTP_AUTHORIZATION $http_authorization;
    • 3