Unable to load when reverse proxy is configured with a location other than root

[pabpas]

First time trying Alby Hub and I noticed that if I serve it (with nginx) to the outside in mydomain.com/alby, the browser will show an error about malformed jwt and the main page will not load. Setting the location to / solves the issue (mydomain.com/).

[rolznz]

Hi, yeah unfortunately I don't think it will work not on the root. alby.mydomain.com would work if you are ok with adding another DNS entry

[daum3ns]

i am confused because my redirect removes the URI. This is also visible in the AlbyHub logs

{"host":"removed","level":"info","msg":"handled API request","remote_ip":"xx.xx.xx.xx","request_id":"wfkXCdKaybzbrkeZKxviGvMBrPjDpqAw","status":200,"time":"2025-02-23T11:58:28Z","uri":"/","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:135.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/135.0"}

as you can see the URI is /, the status code is 200, but the page is just blank.. No indication of an error in the logs..
when i do a request to the /api i get the same "missing or malformed jwt"" error as pabpas

[rolznz]

Hi, what version are you running? did you start/unlock Alby Hub?

[daum3ns]

HI
I use the latest version from github (v1.14.3). No I just started the binary and wanted to access the site but only see a white page. However, i just realized that, when I make a call to the correct port und using plain HTTP (i.e without going through the proxy) i can see the page.
Do you think i need to go through a set up process of some kind before it can work (i'm new to albyhub)?

[rolznz]

@daum3ns what error code do you get on the white page? did you setup the proxy correctly for https and correctly configure your subdomain?

[daum3ns]

let me try to explain better :) my idea was that the reverse proxy (nginx) terminates the tls connection.
i have the following start script for albyhub:

#!/bin/bash

WORK_DIR="/mnt/opt/albyhub/data" LOG_EVENTS=true LDK_GOSSIP_SOURCE="" PORT="8029" LN_BACKEND_TYPE=LND LND_ADDRESS=127.0.0.1:10019 LND_CERT_FILE=<path_to_cert> LND_MACAROON_FILE=<path_to_macaroon> /mnt/opt/albyhub/bin/albyhub

and in the nginx configuration i have defined a backend :

upstream albyhub {
  server 127.0.0.1:8029;
}

and a proxypass directive, to route everything under /albyhub/ to the backend:

  location ^~ /albyhub/ {
    proxy_pass http://albyhub/;
  }

this results in a 200 on first request, but then a bunch of 502's

in comparison, when i browse the port directly (and without https) it seems to work:

I can't do this via subdomain unfortunately...

[daum3ns]

i think i just figured it out... if i make a call to the .js file (which fails to load in screenshot 1) manually, and add the /albyhub/ path in front, i can fetch it....

so albyhub responds with "please load the file from /" but this should be translated to "please load /albyhub/" in my case... i will check if i can achieve this in nginx proxy...

[daum3ns]

seems to be hard to solve this in nginx... i would have to rewrite the responses from albyhub to include the path prefix...

i tried setting both BASE_URL and FRONTEND_URL env vars, but from what i can tell from looking at the code this is only used for oauth redirects...

a setting like PATH_PREFIX or something would be really nice, if it is set, albyhub just always puts it in front of the uri...

could this be added in this line here?

hub/frontend/src/components/redirects/DefaultRedirect.tsx

Line 23 in 3e1d16d

navigate("/");

or could it be done like this?
labstack/echo#2435 (comment)
maybe somewhere here:

hub/cmd/http/main.go

Line 30 in 3e1d16d

e := echo.New()

[rolznz]

@daum3ns I think several changes need to be made to make it work properly and a bit more complex configuration, which I would try to avoid unless really necessary. Just to understand better, why can't you use a subdomain?

[daum3ns]

I am working on the integration of albyhub for the NODL (https://www.nodl.eu/)
at the moment I am developing this in a cloud instance. I don't have access to the DNS entries there, customers get their subdomain and can then access there cloud nodl..
However, in the end it should run on the devices, they are at home and there is no external access.. (except via tor)
How do other nodes do this?
Maybe I can do it by going on a different port (front facing) instead of sub path...

[rolznz]

@daum3ns for self-hosting, Start9 and Umbrel give different .local addresses too.

For nodl cloud using a different port could be good to try, since it wouldn't require any changes on Alby Hub's end. But please let me know if that doesn't work for you.