How to Host Kibana Behind Nginx

Problem Statement

I need to embed Kibana into the page I developed through an iframe. In order to avoid all kinds of CORS issue, I plan to host Kibana and our own developed frontend pages under the same domain through Nginx. We access the main website through https://mydomain.com and access Kibana through https://mydomain.com/kibana

Prerequisite Knowledge

Nginx

►The difference between location /kibana/ and location /kibana

1. location /kibana/:
   • This is a trailing slash location. It matches any request URI that starts with /kibana/ followed by any characters, including none at all. This means it will match URLs like /kibana/, /kibana/index.html, /kibana/dashboard, etc.
   • The key point here is that the trailing slash implies that this location block should match when /kibana/ is treated as a directory or a base of more specific URIs.
2. location /kibana:
   • This is a non-trailing slash location. It matches any request URI that begins with /kibana, not necessarily followed by a slash. Therefore, it matches /kibana, /kibana/, /kibanaanything, /kibana.html, etc.
   • This type of location can sometimes lead to unexpected matches because it does not distinguish between /kibana as a specific file or path and /kibana as a prefix to something else (like /kibana123).

Practical Impact:

• If you intend for /kibana to serve as a specific endpoint or to distinctly redirect or rewrite to another URI, use location /kibana.

• If /kibana/ is meant to be a directory under which multiple paths or resources will be served (common in applications or when proxying), you should use location /kibana/ to ensure only URIs starting with this base path are matched.

►The difference between proxy_pass https://127.0.0.1:5601 and proxy_pass https://127.0.0.1:5601/

• Without trailing slash (proxy_pass https://127.0.0.1:5601): The full original request URI is appended directly to the proxy_pass URL.

  For example, if the location block is defined as location /kibana, and the request is for /kibana/dashboard, the request sent to the proxy will be https://127.0.0.1:5601/dashboard. The /kibana part of the URI is replaced with the URI specified in the proxy_pass.

• With trailing slash (proxy_pass https://127.0.0.1:5601/): The original request URI's leading portion, which matches the location block, is stripped out, and the rest is appended to the proxy_pass URL.

  For the same example, with a location block of location /kibana and a request for /kibana/dashboard, the request sent to the proxy server will be https://127.0.0.1:5601/dashboard — effectively the same as without the trailing slash in this specific case.

Solution

Nginx Configuration

location /kibana {
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5601
}

Kibana Configuration

server.basePath: "/kibana"
server.rewriteBasePath: "true"