Doesn't work with applications which use absolute URLs

I’ve noticed that a few applications that I’ve tried to proxy recently use absolute urls.

For example when running on a regular server if you go to http://localhost:1234/ it will look for a stylesheet at/style/index.css. This works fine when running locally but when using nbserverproxy I visit http://localhost:8888/lab/proxy/1234 which still looks for styles at /style/index.css rather than /lab/proxy/1234/style/index.css.

These applications often take a baseurl config option somewhere which lets you prepend all urls with a base path, such as /lab/proxy/1234. This would allow me to fix this functionality. However it appears nbserverproxy rewrites its urls so when I visit http://localhost:8888/lab/proxy/1234 the path gets rewritten to /. This then causes problems because the application is now expecting a base url of /lab/proxy/1234/. This results in the HTML page not displaying because flask or whatever doesn’t have a route for /, but the CSS would display ok if it were ever requested.

[jacobtomlinson]

That sounds like a pragmatic fix. Perhaps something like proxy_abs for absolute urls?

[betatim]

We could add an option to (not) rewrite URLs to the proxy? http://localhost:8888/lab/dont_rewrite_me_proxy/1234/ (maybe a slightly shorter URL 😉 )