Here’s a cool thing I bet you didn’t know could be done with the NGINX server: proxying APIs from web services. Why would you want to do that? Well, for starters, you can avoid running into cross-domain scripting issues.
Your client-side JavaScript can query an API that doesn’t offer JSON-P support, by having it pass through your server first. You can even cache the results for awhile, so you don’t run into rate limit issues. And if JSON-P is a necessity, you can transform the API response from vanilla JSON to JSON-P by echoing some additional content into the request.
You can read how to do all this in an informative blog post by the founder of DuckDuckGo. It’s pretty much a matter of adding a location block that uses the proxy_pass function to pass the request along.
nginx JSON hacks [Gabriel Weinberg]
