Using NGINX as an Atlassian JIRA Reverse Proxy

I use JIRA in a cloud infrastructure where it’s obviously desirable to serve the contents over SSL, therefore I set up an NGINX as a JIRA reverse proxy for unencrypted requests to the JIRA backend service and handle the SSL on the front end with Let’s Encrypt. We need to let JIRA know that we are proxying it over HTTPS however by setting some values in server.xml first.

Notice that my Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are in the /etc/letsencrypt/live/jira.doublesharp.com directory, but yours will be specific to the hostname you create them for. The certs are created via the letsencrypt command and use Nginx to process the validation request. Once created the generated PEM files can be used in your Nginx config. Note that you will need to comment out this line in the SSL config if they don’t yet exist, start Nginx to create the certs, uncomment the lines to enable SSL, and then restart Nginx once again (whew!).

JIRA Reverse Proxy Configuration

Configure JIRA to add proxyName, proxyPort, scheme, and secure parameters to the Tomcat Connector in server.xml.

<Connector port="8081" 
           maxThreads="150" 
           minSpareThreads="25" 
           connectionTimeout="20000" 
           enableLookups="false" 
           maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" 
           protocol="HTTP/1.1" 
           useBodyEncodingForURI="true" 
           redirectPort="8443" 
           acceptCount="100" 
           disableUploadTimeout="true" 
           bindOnInit="false" 
                    
           proxyName="jira.doublesharp.com" 
           proxyPort="443" 
           scheme="https" 
           secure="true" 
/>

Don’t forget to copy the database driver to $JIRA_INSTALL/lib.

Nginx Reverse Proxy Configuration

Note use of “jira.doublesharp.com” in config and change as needed. This configuration uses a subdomain specific certificate from Let’s Encrypt, but you could also use a Wildcard Certificate for your JIRA reverse proxy setup as well which can help to consolidate your key generation.

# Upstream JIRA server on port 8081. Use 127.0.0.1 and not localhost to force IPv4.
upstream jira {
  server       127.0.0.1:8081 fail_timeout=0;
}

# listen on HTTP2/SSL
server {
  listen       443 ssl http2;
  server_name  jira.doublesharp.com;

  # ssl certs from letsencrypt
  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/jira.doublesharp.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/jira.doublesharp.com/privkey.pem;

  location / {
    # allow uploads up to 10MB
    client_max_body_size 10m;
    # set proxy headers for cloudflare/jira
    proxy_set_header  Host $host:$server_port;
    proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    # hand the request off to jira on non-ssl
    proxy_pass        http://jira;
  }
}

# redirect HTTP and handle let's encrypt requests
server {
  listen       80;
  server_name  jira.doublesharp.com;
  root         /var/lib/jira;
  
  # handle letsencrypt domain validation
  location ~ /.well-known {
    allow all;
  }

  # send everything else to HTTPS
  location / {
    return 302 https://jira.doublesharp.com;
  }
}