Fossil

## <a name="modes"></a>Fossil Service Modes

Fossil provides four major ways to access a repository it’s serving
remotely, three of which are straightforward to use with nginx:

*   **HTTP** — Fossil has a built-in HTTP server: [`fossil
    server`](../any/none.md).  While this method is efficient and it’s
    possible to use nginx to proxy access to another HTTP server, we
    don’t see any particularly good reason to make nginx reinterpret

    Fossil’s own implementation of HTTP when we have a better option.
    (But see [below](#http).)

*   **CGI** — This method is simple but inefficient, because it launches
    a separate Fossil instance on every HTTP hit.

    Since Fossil is a relatively small self-contained program, and it’s
    designed to start up quickly, this method can work well in a
    surprisingly large number of cases.

repetition across `server { }` blocks when setting up multiple domains
on a single server.

The configuration for `foo.net` is similar.

See [the nginx docs](http://nginx.org/en/docs/) for more ideas.


## <a name="http"></a>Proxying HTTP Anyway

[Above](#modes), we argued that proxying SCGI is a better option than
making nginx reinterpret Fossil’s own implementation of HTTP.  If you
want Fossil to speak HTTP, just [set Fossil up as a standalone
server](../any/none.md). And if you want nginx to [provide TLS
encryption for Fossil][tls], proxying HTTP instead of SCGI provides no
benefit.

However, it is still worth showing the proper method of proxying
Fossil’s HTTP server through nginx if only to make reading nginx
documentation on other sites easier:

        location /code {
            rewrite ^/code(/.*) $1 break;
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:12345;
        }

The most common thing people get wrong when hand-rolling a configuration
like this is to get the slashes wrong. Fossil is senstitive to this. For
instance, Fossil will not collapse double slashes down to a single
slash, as some other HTTP servers will.

*[Return to the top-level Fossil server article.](../)*