Web Hosting

This website, as most ShinySpace websites, is served via an Nginx Reverse Proxy. This is useful because it allows ShinySpace to offer several different websites and services all on one port (443 for https) and IP.

 

This works as follows:

The website you type in your browser (for example wiki.shiny.space) always points to shiny.space - so blog.shiny.space, factory.shiny.space etc all go to the same IP Address. 

From there, the port forwards send the requests to the Nginx Reverse Proxy running on Webvm1. That proxy can actually read which address you typed in, and uses that information to redirect your request to the proper place - this can either be itself if the website you requested is on Webvm1 too, but can also be a completely different virtual machine, as the one you're currently reading - this is running on a VM called bookstack.

 

A huge advantage of such a setup is also HTTPS - it allows secure connections into ShinySpace to one single point, meaning there is no need to manage several different certificates for all the different services. The connection to Webvm1 is secure, and after that it's ShinySpace's choice of how to continue the request - some services insist on having their own certificate, so the HTTPS connection is passed on. Other services don't care as much, so we can terminate the HTTPS at Webvm1 and just use plain old HTTP inside the ShinySpace network, since it's supposed to be secure.

 

How this is achieved is a TODO, the configuration files should show up here later.