PowerServer 2022 R2 Help
(Optional) Configuring a reverse proxy server

In this tutorial, we will learn how to set up Windows IIS as the reverse proxy server which redirects requests to the PowerServer Web APIs running on the Kestrel server. This is also known as the IIS out-of-process hosting which runs the PowerServer Web APIs in a process separate from the IIS worker process and forwards the requests made to the IIS reverse proxy to the Kestrel server.

In this tutorial, we will configure and use the following server environment and URLs. Make sure the port number is not occupied by any other program. For how to verify if a port number is occupied, follow the instructions in Choosing an appropriate port number.

Step 1: Set up the reverse proxy server with the following OS and software (install the software in the order listed).

Step 2: Make sure the server can connect to the NuGet site: https://www.nuget.org (for installing PowerServer NuGet packages) and the Appeon license server (for validating the PowerServer license).

Step 3: Configure Windows Defender Firewall on the server to allow the port number (80 and 8080 in this tutorial or any port number you choose). The section "Configuring Windows Defender Firewall" has detailed instructions.

This section is to configure IIS as a reverse proxy server.

Step 1: Open the IIS manager, select the server in the Connections pane, and then double click Application Request Routing Cache to open the feature.

Step 2: In the Actions pane, click Server Proxy Settings.

Step 3: On the Application Request Routing page, select Enable Proxy; and then in the Actions pane, click Apply. This enables ARR as a proxy at the server level.

Step 4: Select the website (listening on port 8080 in this tutorial) in the Connections pane, and then double click URL Rewrite to open the feature.

Step 5: In the Actions pane, click Add Rule(s).

Step 6: In the Add Rule(s) dialog, select Reverse Proxy and click OK.

Step 7: In the Add Reverse Proxy Rules dialog, input the URL of the PowerServer Web API running on the Kestrel server (https://172.16.100.35:6000/ in this tutorial). Click OK.

You must modify the Web API URL to point to the IIS reverse proxy server.

Step 1: Go to the [appname] folder (for example, "salesdemo_cloud") on the web server and open the apprun.json file in a text editor.

The web server and the IIS reverse proxy server can reside in the same or different machine. If the web server is an IIS HTTP server, it can be the same or different server instance with the IIS reverse proxy server.

Step 2: Set the value of Web API URL to the URL of the IIS reverse proxy server, for example, https://172.16.100.81:8080. It is highly recommended that you specify an HTTPS URL for the production environment.

All requests for the PowerServer Web APIs will be first made to https://172.16.100.81:8080 and then redirected by the IIS reverse proxy server to the PowerServer Web APIs running on the Kestrel server (for example, https://172.16.100.35:6000).

Now let's run the PowerServer Web APIs and verify that the requests are forwarded successfully from the reverse proxy server to the PowerServer Web APIs.

In order to view the detailed log information, let's directly start the PowerServer Web APIs as a console application in the local development environment, using either of the following methods:

Make sure the PowerServer Web APIs is running on the correct IP address and port number. For example, https://172.16.100.35:6000/ in this tutorial. You may modify the port number in the launchSettings.json file of the ServerAPIs project of the PowerServer C# solution when running in the development environment.

Run the application (https://172.16.100.72:80/salesdemo_cloud in this tutorial). You should be able to see from the console that the requests are going through successfully.

Once you have verified that the reverse proxy server works properly, you can publish and start the PowerServer Web APIs in a production environment, as described in Running Web APIs with Kestrel.