Simple inbound HTTP server

I wanted to show a webpage I've been toying with to a friend today. The project is in Django and I didn't want to take the time to deploy it to a permanent host like heroku. I know it is easy to do that, but I was just feeling lazy. I came up with a cool trick today for doing exactly this. I have a server that I leave on 100% of the time.

I realized that I could use this server as a simple proxy and forward any web requests that came to a special domain.

Using SSH I created a reverse tunnel that made my localhost's 8000 port availble on the remote machine on port 1234.

ssh -R 1234:127.0.0.1:8000 ${HOST}

This server runs nginx and has the ability to handle vhosts. I made a very simple nginx entry that forwarded proxy.mydomain.com to localhost:1234. It looked something like this:

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server {
    listen   80;
    server_name   ~^(www\.)?proxy.example.com$;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/proxy.access.log;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:1234;
    }
}

I wrapped all this up in a simple little shell script and put it on my 'PATH'

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#! /usr/bin/env bash
if [ ! -z $1 ]
then
    port=$1
else
    port=8000
fi

echo "Connecting to server to forward port ${port} at \
      http://proxy.example.com/"
ssh -R 1234:127.0.0.1:${port} example.com \
      "echo 'Forwarding... press enter to exit'; read"

Now when I run forward_http from the command line, it will automagically forward my local port 8000 to the proxy domain I set up.