Websockets with the main application (nginx + passenger + faye) - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to setup websockets on my rails application. My application works with iOS client that uses SocketRocker library.
As websockets backend i use faye-rails gem.
It is integrated to the rails app as rack middleware
config.middleware.delete Rack::Lock
config.middleware.use FayeRails::Middleware, mount: '/ws', server: 'passenger', engine: {type: Faye::Redis, uri: redis_uri}, :timeout => 25 do
map default: :block
end
It works perfect until i upload it to the production server with Nginx. I have tried a lot of solutions to pass websocket request to the backend, but with no luck. The main thing is there are two servers running, but i have just one. My idea was i just needed to proxify requests from /faye endpoint to /ws (to update headers). What is correct proxy_pass parameters should be in my case?
location /faye {
proxy_pass http://$server_name/ws;
proxy_buffering off;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
}

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and after struggling for a while, I finally could make it work.
I'm using nginx 1.8 with thin server with gem 'faye-rails' and my mount point is /faye
My nginx config looked like this:
upstream thin_server {
server 127.0.0.1:3000;
}
map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
default upgrade;
'' close;
}
server {
...
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_cache off;
location = /faye {
proxy_pass http://thin_server;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
chunked_transfer_encoding off;
proxy_buffering off;
proxy_cache off;
}
location / {
try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri #proxy;
}
location #proxy {
proxy_pass http://thin_server;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
}
...
}
The final turn point for me to make it work was when I set the "location = /faye". Before I tried "location /faye" and "location ~ /faye" and it failed.
It looks like the equal sign "=" prevents nginx to mix with other location settings.