Colleagues,

I encountered a curious problem while configuring nginx as a proxy for Galaxy. I posed the question through Enis who forwarded it to one of the lists. I just want to share a solution to the issue, which could perhaps be documented in a small change to the http://bitbucket.org/galaxy/galaxy-central/wiki/Config/nginxProxy documentation page.

The observed problem was that Galaxy proxied through NGINX would only display properly in Microsoft IE but not in Firefox or Opera. One of my colleagues noticed that a Firefox error console reported that the various cascading style sheets were observed as having MIME type "text/plain" not "text/css" hence, where not loaded by Firefox. Presumably IE assumed CSS file type by the context of retrieval but the other browsers were more strict.

Anyhow, this suggested that although NGINX has a configuration file of MIME types associated with file extensions, the content-type wasn't being properly set. I don't know if this represents a bug in NGINX operations, but after perusing the NGINX wiki docs, I came across a directive that appeared to solve the problem: default_type.

The "default_type" covers any files in a specified context (http, server, location) which don't otherwise have their MIME type recognized (for whatever reason) and is itself originally set "by default" to "text/plain", which may explain the observed error in content type sent back.

What I therefore did is reset the default type, in the style sheet nginx "location" directive context, to "text/css". This appeared to work.

In the nginxProxy wiki documentation page on BitBucket, somebody with editorial privileges to this page may wish to document this throughout the page where the style directives are documented , i.e.

        location /static/style {
            alias /home/nate/galaxy_dist/static/june_2007_style/blue;

            default_type text/css;
            # other directives...
        }


Cheers,

Richard Bruskiewich, PhD
Senior Scientist, Computational and Systems Biology
Applications Team for Computational Genomics
T.T. Chang Genetic Resources Center
International Rice Research Institute