How to ngnix reverse proxy to react application locally?

Question

I have a React application that I run locally on port 3000. I have a node express server/api that I run on port 8000. I wanting to use ngnix locally to communicate between the applications as a reverse proxy without docker locally. I also eventually want deploy this combo to Google Compute Engine.

How would I set up ngnix locally to communicate between applications that would be successful to deploy to compute engine if given a flag of production vs dev?

I'm at a lost here. Anything would help. Much appreciated!

Answer 1

You can use the following code in default.conf

server {
  root /var/www/html;
  
  server_name _;

# this is the react application endpoints
  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
  }

# this is the nodejs api endpoints
  location /api {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
  }
}