Gitea in a Subdirectory with Nginx

Running web applications from the subdirectory of a URL has its benefits. There doesn’t seem to be much talk about this technique. A series of posts about running my favorite open source applications from a URL subdirectory sounds like a good idea.

It’s useful when you need to expose a web application quickly without provisioning a new subdomain and SSL certificate.

For example let’s run Gitea from the subdirectory of a domain using Nginx. We will make Gitea accessible from a URL of the form https://www.example.com/gitea or https://www.example.com/git.

To accomplish this, reverse proxy using a separate location block in the nginx configuration. We are connecting over a unix socket to access the Gitea instance. The forward slashes at the end of the proxy_pass are important and match the location block.

location /gitea/ {
    proxy_pass http://unix:/opt/gitea/var/lib/gitea/gitea.socket:/;
}

Then in Gitea’s app.ini configuration, adjust the server block to match the location block specified above. Be sure that broad caching and deny directives are not applied to the reverse proxy location block or you might end up with strange 404s and exotic behavior.

[server]
PROTOCOL         = unix
SSH_DOMAIN       = example.com
DOMAIN           = http://www.example.com/gitea/
ROOT_URL         = http://www.example.com/gitea/
HTTP_ADDR        = /opt/gitea/var/lib/gitea/gitea.socket

A user can access the full Gitea instance from the gitea/ subdirectory of the URL.

All applications are not created equal and some blow up badly in a subdirectory. Gitea supports this natively from the configuration.

Some applications require elaborate tricks, workarounds, or source code changes that are probably not worth the effort.