Can I use Clojure with nginx?

Question

This is a follow up to my question here. I've set up a home server (just my other laptop running ubuntu and nginx) and I want to serve clojure files.

I am asking help for understanding how this process works. I am sorry at this point I am confused and I think I need to start over. I am asking a new question because I want to use nginx not lein ring server, as suggested in the answer for that question.

First I started a project guestbook with leiningen and I ran lein ring server and I see "Hello World" at localhost:3000. As far as I understand this has nothing to do with nginx!

How does nginx enter in this process? At first I was trying to create a proxy server with nginx and that worked too, but I did not know how serve clojure files with that setup.

This is what I have in my nginx.conf file adapted from this answer:

 upstream ring {
    server 127.0.0.1:3000 fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
    root /home/a/guestbook/resources/public;

    # make site accessible from http://localhost
    server_name localhost;

    location / {
        # first attempt to serve request as file
        try_files $uri $uri/ @ring;
    }

    location @ring {
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_buffering off;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass http://ring;
    }

    location ~ ^(assets|images|javascript|stylesheets|system)/ {
        expires    max;
        add_header Cache-Control public;
    }
}

So I want to use my domain example.com (not localhost); how do I go about doing this?

---

EDIT

As per @noisesmith's comment I will opt to go with lein uberjar option. As explained here, it appears very easy to create one:

$ lein uberjar
Unpacking clojure-1.1.0-alpha-20091113.120145-2.jar
Unpacking clojure-contrib-1.0-20091114.050149-13.jar
Compiling helloworld
      [jar] Building jar: helloworld.jar
$ java -jar helloworld.jar 
Hello world!

Can you also direct me to the right documentation about how I can use this uberjar with nginx?

Answer 1

Please try Nginx-Clojure module. You can run clojure Ring handlers with Nginx without any Java Web Server, eg. Jetty.

Answer 2

For starters, don't use lein to run things in production. You can use lein uberjar to create a jar file with all your deps ready to run, and java -jar to run the app from the resulting jar. There is also the option of running lein ring uberwar to create a war archive to be run inside tomcat, which provides some other conveniences (like log rotation and integration with /etc/init.d as a service etc. on most Linux systems).

nginx sits in front of your app, on port 80. It will serve up the content by proxying your app. This is useful because nginx has many capabilities (especially regarding security) that you then don't need to implement in your own app, including optional integration with https and selinux integration. Using nginx in front of your app also prevents you from needing to run java as root (typically only the root user can use port 80). Furthermore you can let nginx serve static assets directly, rather than having to serve them from your app.