I ran across a few niggles in setting up ColdFusion and Lucee behind a Nginx web server, and thought it might be helpful to document the solutions I came to.

The first small problem was that when users logged out of an FW/1 app, they would encounter a blank screen rather than being redirected to the login screen. Further investigation, using Chrome’s Developer Tools Network panel, showed that Nginx was returning a blank location response header on the redirect to the login screen. I’m still not exactly clear why this is occuring - other 302 redirects within the app work as expected, but the solution I came up with worked like a charm. All I needed to do was use the proxy_redirect directive alongside the proxy_pass directive, redirecting a blank location to the root location, like so:

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proxy_redirect '' /;

I was happy that it worked as I guessed it would. In any case, proxy_redirect is a handy directive to have in your toolkit.

In another case, a url pointing to a directory without a trailing slash would result in a 404 error behind Nginx. This url was being processed using the proxy_pass directive. For example, http://domain.com/directory would result in a 404 while http://domain.com/directory/ works, locating the default index.cfm template under /directory.

Since I had only one url to adjust, the solution was rather simple:

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rewrite ^/directory$ /directory/ redirect;

There are several trailing slash issues using Nginx that need to be taken into account. Search for “nginx trailing slash” to get a handle on them.