Unable to install Ghost on Nginx

Developer help Installation
1
  • What version of Ghost are you using?
    Latest
  • What configuration?
    Nginx SSL
  • What browser?
    Firefox
  • What errors or information do you see in the console?
    Infinite redirect loop

Hello at all,

I’m trying to install Ghost for the past 6 hours but I’m in a lot of troubles. I want to use Nginx as reverse proxy. I configured Nginx to use 443 and to proxy pass to Ghost. Now starts the pain :

on Firefox, I have an infinite 301 redirect loop. On certain pages, not all of them. Mostly on the homepage.
I then realized that Chrome was working fine for some time. Until it failed the same way :face_with_raised_eyebrow:
I have tried to clear cache, history, restart browser. The results are not consistent at all.
So now I’m ending up at testing with wget --no-cache.

But now, everything is working except the homepage and I really don’t know why…

I don’t need SSL between nginx and ghost so I did not “ghost setup ssl”. I already have a valid certificate for nginx.

I must say that I have quite a lot of experience on Nginx and that I have been working with proxy pass many times. I have never got this result. I wonder who is doing the double redirection that fails on the homepage.

I am just getting crazy, any help would be appreciated :grinning:
thanks a lot

2

I have never worked on Express. But I noticed that on Ghost, paths must be terminated with /.
For example /ghost : if the final / is not there, there will be a 301 redirect to /ghost/

I have compared with another setup I did with Nginx + SSL + Proxy pass and there is not the same behavior.

I wonder if this is related to my homepage issue

3

Hey @ademain :wave:

Here are some troubleshooting steps that might steer you in the right direction:

  1. If you’re using https, your Ghost URL must be set to https://.... If you make a change, make sure you restart ghost!

  2. Ensure you’re passing the X-Forwarded-Proto header from nginx to ghost

  3. If you have CloudFlare in front of your site, make sure you have SSL set to strict or full - setting it to flexible will cause issues with a site upgrading HTTP requests

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

4

Thanks @vikaspotluri123,

I have done A LOT of testing of different settings. To answer your points :
1/ My ghost url starts with https://
2/ I’m passing the right headers. I have check the ghost-cli Nginx template
3/ I’m not using Cloudflare.

My Nginx setting is the following:

server {
  server_name mydomain.net;
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;
  
  #HTTP_TO_HTTPS_END
  ssl_certificate    /www/server/panel/vhost/cert/mydomain.net/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key    /www/server/panel/vhost/cert/mydomain.net/privkey.pem;
  ssl_protocols TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
  ssl_ciphers EECDH+CHACHA20:EECDH+CHACHA20-draft:EECDH+AES128:RSA+AES128:EECDH+AES256:RSA+AES256:EECDH+3DES:RSA+3DES:!MD5;
  ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
  ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m;
  ssl_session_timeout 10m;
  add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000";
  error_page 497  https://$host$request_uri;
  
#PROXY-START/

location /
{
	
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:2368/;
    resolver 1.1.1.1 8.8.8.8;
    proxy_redirect off;  # I tried with and without this setting

location ~ /.well-known {
    allow all;
}


#PROXY-END/  
  location ~ ^/(\.user.ini|\.htaccess|\.git|\.svn|\.project|LICENSE|README.md)
  {
      return 404;
  }
  
  
  access_log  /www/wwwlogs/mydomain.net.log;
  error_log  /www/wwwlogs/mydomain.net.error.log;  
}

Thanks

5

I found a temporary solution : when editing the content/settings/routes.yaml file and changing the default / route to /home/, everything works now. So the problem is really with the homepage. But this fix is not enough as the / URL is still broken

6

ERRATUM : not working.

I did a redirect from / to /home/ => that works
The page /author/axel works
The posts URLs work
The page /ghos returns a proper 404 (normal)

But the page /ghost/ does the infinite loop.

EDIT : the loop occurs on Firefox, not on Chrome. I’m getting really lost …

7

For some reason, it works fine when I enable the proxy cache. But I can’t enable it for all page (because of the ghost BO). So disabling the cache for /ghost/ leads to a infinite loop.

8

Can you confirm your Ghost version?

With your caching strategy, that’s really weird, the rule of thumb is the admin panel should never be cached (e.g. /ghost/*) since most 1-click caching solutions don’t work well with them.

Can you try using curl locally to see how ghost is behaving?

e.g. curl -I http://127.0.0.1:2368/ghost/ -H "Host: mydomain.com" -H "X-Forwarded-Proto: https"

If that’s working, then you know that everything in Ghost is set up properly so you can move to debugging nginx

9

My Ghost version is 3.39.2.

Actually, my blog is working fine on Chrome now, all pages fine.
But not on Firefox. Many page are still redirecting. It really weird. I tried in private mode, I tried from safe mode, I tried to clear the cache…

The result of your command:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Express
Cache-Control: no-cache, private, no-store, must-revalidate, max-stale=0, post-check=0, pre-check=0
X-Frame-Options: sameorigin
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Sat, 26 Oct 1985 08:15:00 GMT
ETag: W/"db8-7438674ba0"
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 3512
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2020 16:35:14 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=5

Thanks

10

I just called a friend. Same issue: it works with Chrome and Safari but not with Firefox … :pensive:

11

Hello

For information, this is SOLVED. I was using aaPanel with Nginx module. It seems aaPanel doesn’t do it right despite my numerous tries to change the nginx config.
I removed aaPanel, reinstalled Nginx manually and reinstalled the blog. Working now. Thanks for your help.