Deployment with nginx

It is strongly recommended to deploy WT1 behind a reverse-proxy server. Deploying behind a reverse-proxy brings the following advantages:

• Only the minimal set of URIs required for the tracker functionality is exposed to the public. See Security considerations
• The reverse proxy will offload the management of client connections from the servlet container, and only keep a reduced number of persistent connections to the servlet container.

NGInx is a popular and lightweight web server, which works very well as a reverse proxy.

In this scenario, nginx will receive the incoming connections from the tracking JS snippet or the API clients and forward them to the Web application backend.

Assumptions

• The tracker is running on the same machine as the nginx host, on port 8080, deployed on context path /wt1/
• The clients and tracking JS snippet want to access the tracker on http://tracker.mycompany.com/public/p.gif and http://tracker.mycompany.com/public/events
• The tracking JS snippet is served by nginx, at address http://tracker.mycompany.com/track.js

Install nginx

aptitude install nginx
yum install nginx

Install WT1

You can simply follow the instructions in the Installing as a standalone Web application.

Configure nginx

Find the server block of your nginx configuration. In Debian and Ubuntu, it's located in /etc/nginx/sites-available/default or another virtual host. Store the tracking JS (and other static contents as needed) in a suitable directory, e.g. /data/wt1/htdocs

Put something like that in the server block

server {
    # It's 2013, listen to IPv4 and IPv6
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
 
    server_name tracker.mycompany.com
 
    # Static files including tracker script
    root /data/wt1/htdocs;
    expires 2h;
 
 
    # Forward the public APIs to the tracker
    location /public {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080/wt1/public;
        expires off;
    }
 
    # Reverse proxy configuration
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Connection "";
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
}

That's it.

Just reload your nginx configuration: /etc/init.d/nginx reload

Point your browser to http://tracker.mycompany.com/public/p.gif and you should get the tracking pixel.