CI: How to create a Nginx reverse proxy for Jenkins in arm64 macOS using Docker Compose?

4 min readMay 7, 2023

My struggles resolving HTTP 502 bad gateway when creating Nginx reverse proxy for Jenkins in following the reverse proxy configuration — Nginx in Jenkins website. I created this post hoping to help others who are in the same struggle. Although their is a video from CloudBeesTV which was helpful for me to understand how Nginx reverse proxy configuration needs to be changed but as the presenter in the video performed a command inside the docker container to resolve the HTTP 502 bad gateway and in my case it was not working as the presenter and I were using a different distribution of docker build image of Nginx.

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Docker Compose

Create `docker-compose.yml` file and paste the following code,

version: '3.7'
services:
  jenkins:
    image: jenkins/jenkins:lts
    user: root
    ports:
      - "50000:50000"
    volumes:
      - 'jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home'
      - '/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock'
      - '$HOME:/home'
    networks:
      - jenkins-net
    environment:
      - JAVA_OPTS=-Djenkins.install.runSetupWizard=false
  nginx:
    image: nginx:stable
    user: root
    networks:
      - jenkins-net
    ports:
      - '80:80'
    volumes:
      - '/var/log/nginx/jenkins'
      - '$PWD/jenkins.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf'
      - '/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock'
volumes:
  jenkins-data:
networks:
  jenkins-net:

In the above code,

I’m using the jenkins lts docker build image

image: jenkins/jenkins:lts

as a root user

user: root

Inbound Jenkins agents communicate with the Jenkins controller through TCP port 50000 by default.

ports:
      - "50000:50000"

I’m using jenkins-data volume is used and /var/run/docker.sock is basically the Unix socket the Docker daemon listens on by default. It is also a tool used to communicate with the Docker daemon from within a container. Sometimes, containers need to bind mount the /var/run/docker.sock file.

volumes:
      - 'jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home'
      - '/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock'
      - '$HOME:/home'

using the internal network jenkins-net

networks:
      - jenkins-net

Skipping the default setup wizard in jenkins

environment:
      - JAVA_OPTS=-Djenkins.install.runSetupWizard=false

I’m using nginx stable docker build image

image: nginx:stable

The localhost 127.0.0.1 is listening to port 80

ports:
      - '80:80'

A new file is created in Nginx docker container for storing jenkins logs. The local file jenkins.conf replaces the default.conf in the Nginx docker container.

volumes:
      - '/var/log/nginx/jenkins'
      - '$PWD/jenkins.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf'
      - '/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock'

The networks and volumes are created

volumes:
  jenkins-data:
networks:
  jenkins-net:

Docker network: jenkins-net

Docker network needs to be created in order to interconnect Nginx and Jenkins docker containers.

docker network create — driver bridge jenkins-net

Nginx Jenkins configuration

Nginx jenkins configuraiton file that is used by the Nginx proxy server to forward requests to Jenkins.

Create a file jenkins.conf and paste the following code,

# Required for Jenkins websocket agents
map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
  default upgrade;
  '' close;
}

server {

    listen 80;
    server_name jenkins.example.com

    access_log off;
    # this is the jenkins web root directory
    # (mentioned in the output of "systemctl cat jenkins")
    root /var/run/jenkins/war/;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/jenkins.access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/jenkins.error.log;

    # pass through headers from Jenkins that Nginx considers invalid
    ignore_invalid_headers off;

    location ~ "^/static/[0-9a-fA-F]{8}\/(.*)$" {
    # rewrite all static files into requests to the root
    # E.g /static/12345678/css/something.css will become /css/something.css
    rewrite "^/static/[0-9a-fA-F]{8}\/(.*)" /$1 last;
    }

    location / {

        proxy_pass http://jenkins:8080;
        proxy_redirect     default;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;

        # Required for Jenkins websocket agents
        proxy_set_header   Connection        $connection_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header   Upgrade           $http_upgrade;

        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        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 http;
        proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

        proxy_connect_timeout 150;
        proxy_send_timeout 100;
        proxy_read_timeout 100;

        proxy_buffer_size 8k;
        proxy_buffers 4 32k;
        proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
        proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
    }
}