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Setting up a reverse proxy

A reverse proxy is a public-facing web server sitting in front of an internal server such as Airsonic. The Airsonic server never communicates with the outside ; instead, the reverse proxy handles all HTTP(S) requests and forwards them to Airsonic.

This is useful in many ways, such as gathering all web configuration in the same place. It also handles some options (HTTPS) much better than the bundled Airsonic server or a servlet container such as Tomcat.

This guide assumes you already have a working Airsonic installation after following the installation guide.

Getting a TLS certificate

This guide assumes you already have a TLS certificate. Let’s Encrypt currently provides such certificates for free using the certbot software.

Configure Airsonic

Basic configuration

A few settings should be tweaked via Spring Boot or Tomcat configuration:

  • Set the context path if needed (the rest of this guide assumes /airsonic, the default value is /)
  • Set the correct address to listen to (the rest of this guide assumes 127.0.0.1)
  • Set the correct port to listen to (the rest of this guide assumes 8080)

To change this, please use one of the guide below according to your installation:

Forward headers

You will also need to make sure Airsonic uses the correct headers for redirects, by setting the server.use-forward-headers property to true.

To do so, stop your Airsonic server or Docker image, then edit the config/application.properties file:

nano /path/to/airsonic/config/application.properties

Add the following line to the bottom of the file:

server.use-forward-headers=true

Use Ctrl+X to save and exit the file, and restart your Airsonic server or Docker image.

Reverse proxy configuration

How it works

Airsonic expects proxies to provide information about their incoming URL so that Airsonic can craft it when needed. To do so, Airsonic looks for the following HTTP headers:

  • X-Forwarded-Host
    • Provides server name and optionally port in the case that the proxy is on a non-standard port
  • X-Forwarded-Proto
    • Tells Airsonic whether to craft an HTTP or HTTPS url
  • X-Forwarded-Server
    • This is only a fallback in the case that X-Forwarded-Host is not available

Currently this is used wherever, NetworkService#getBaseUrl is called. A couple notable places include:

  • Stream urls
  • Share urls
  • Coverart urls

Provided configurations

Use a guide in the list below: