A note from my study about how to setup and use nginx to work as proxy, so that we could bypass cors  [+] limitation to fetch data (disclaimer!).

Installation

Here I use centos system, so according to nginx offical document  [+] Firstly it needs to add nginx yum repo by creation of file at /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo

# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo
[nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=https://nginx.org/packages/centos/8/x86_64/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

I was not sure about the version of the server, then found a command that could show some system info

# hostnamectl
.....
  Operating System: CentOS Linux 8
       CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:centos:centos:8
            Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-240.1.1.el8_3.x86_64
      Architecture: x86-64

Therefore, the repo path should be "nginx.org/packages/centos/8/x86_64/"

continue with "yum install nginx"

After installation finished, we could check if systemd  [+] is setup

# systemctl status nginx
● nginx.service - The nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)

.... nginx.service: Unit cannot be reloaded because it is inactive.

Configuration

somewhere in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf, is a directive that includes "sites-enabled" include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; Therefore I could just place my nginx configs in site-enabled folder

gzip

gzip off;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_types text/plain application/javascript application/x-javascript text/css application/xml text/javascript;

HTTPS

Install ngx_http_proxy_connect_module  [+] for forward http proxy

Firstly, I have to install some dependencies used by nginx compilation

#install regular expression lib
apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev  
#install zlib to support compression
apt-get install zlib1g-dev
#install open-ssl
apt-get install openssl libssl-dev

Check NGINX installed modules

nginx -V 2>&1 | tr ' ' '\n'