tl;dr: Web apps should work behind reverse-proxy servers out of the box.  Use relative URLs.

As a digression from my usual policy-wonk fare, I’d like to take a short moment to coin a term: “reverse-proxy friendly”.  This is a property of web-applications such that they can be used behind a reverse-proxy server without the need for the proxy server to re-write URLs in HTML.  (And without the for the operator of said application to modify anything about the app.)  The main thing that a web app needs to do (in order to be reverse-proxy friendly) is to use relative URLs, but sometimes there are other changes as well, such as changes to Javascript that computes AJAX or WebSocket endpoints.

Here’s my issue:  Continue reading →