Proxying Transmission Web interface with nginx
September 29, 2010 Leave a Comment
0. Why do this?
Easy for me : I use a PCH box as my torrent client.
It’s really nice, but it cannot :
- Use IPv6 (I don’t want to forward ports when it can be avoided)
- Protect the Transmission web interface with a password
On the other hand
- My macbook is always on (though I’ll replace this with a Guruplug… if I ever receive the one I ordered)
- I want to access the torrent administration interface when I’m not at home
- I wanted to tinker with nginx
1. The easy solution
server {
listen :8080;
server_name bt.coding-badger.net;
location / {
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.2:9091/;
}
}
Ok. We’re done. Redirect all requests to bt.coding-badger.net:8080 to the popcorn hour box on transmission’s port. KTHXBYE
2. Less subdirectories, moar fun!
Wait, of course we aren’t. It would be no fun at all. I don’t really like to have to access this page through /transmission/web/. We’re already on a special vhost, so I want my bt page at the root!
server {
listen :8080;
server_name bt.coding-badger.net;
location /transmission {
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.2:9091/transmission;
}
location / {
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.2:9091/transmission/web/;
}
}
What happens there? First you have to know what transmission does :
- “/” requests are redirected to “/transmission/web” with a 301 Error page
- /transmission/web/ contains javascript, css, pages, etc…
- /transmission/upload is used to upload a torrent
- /transmission/rpc is used to update the window
What we do is redirect all requests that hit / to /transmission/web/ on the transmission server (that way we can be on the / page and transmission will think we’re on /transmission/web and not attempt to redirect), and redirect all other /transmission/* requests to /transmission/*
You can tweak this to your liking, but you have to remember :
NEVER. EVER hit the “/” on the transmission web interface with your proxy, because it will redirect the browser to /transmission/web. You could probably handle this with a “proxy_redirect” command in the nginx configuration, but it’s a bit tricky to get right.
3. IPv6
On OSX, I use brew as the package manager for OSX. Unfortunately, it does not compile nginx with ipv6 support by default!
$ brew edit nginx
Go to the install function, and add –enable-ipv6 to the args array
$ brew install nginx
On debian, it should be compiled with ipv6 by default. You can check by running
$ nginx -Vnginx version: nginx/0.7.67TLS SNI support enabledconfigure arguments: --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/nginx/0.7.67 --with-http_ssl_module --with-pcre --conf-path=/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --pid-path=/usr/local/var/run/nginx.pid --lock-path=/usr/local/var/nginx/nginx.lock --with-ipv6nginx version: nginx/0.7.67TLS SNI support enabledconfigure arguments: --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/nginx/0.7.67 --with-http_ssl_module --with-pcre --conf-path=/usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --pid-path=/usr/local/var/run/nginx.pid --lock-path=/usr/local/var/nginx/nginx.lock --with-ipv6
If you’ve got –enable-ipv6 you’re all good!
Then we have to update the “listen” configuration of the server to tell it to use IPv4 and IPv6
server {
listen [::]:8080; # this enables ipv6
server_name bt.coding-badger.net;
location /transmission {
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.2:9091/transmission;
}
location / {
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.2:9091/transmission/web/;
}
}
4. Authentication
We don’t want our transmission client to be accessed by anyone! nginx can provide authentication through htpasswd files
$ sudo htpasswd -c /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.passwd <username>
Enter the password you wish, then setup nginx to request a password :
server {
listen [::]:8080;
server_name bt.coding-badger.net;
location /transmission {
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.2:9091/transmission;
}
location / {
proxy_pass http://192.168.0.2:9091/transmission/web/;
}
auth_basic "Restricted";
auth_basic_user_file /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.passwd;
}
Of course, if you are not using brew, you may want to use more “traditionnal” places for the passwd file, (like /etc/nginx instead of /usr/local/etc/nginx… use the same directory as your nginx config file)
