Proxying RabbitMQ Management UI Through Nginx (Fixing the %2F Problem)

The Problem When you put RabbitMQ's Management UI behind an nginx reverse proxy under a sub-path like /rabbitmq/ , queue detail pages and many API calls break silently. The root cause: nginx normalizes the request URI before proxying. It decodes %2F (the URL-encoded forward slash) into a literal / . RabbitMQ's Management API uses %2F to represent the default virtual host ( / ) in API paths: GET /api/queues/%2F/my-queue When nginx decodes it: GET /api/queues///my-queue ← broken What Doesn't Work The common advice of using merge_slashes off or a rewrite directive doesn't fully solve this because nginx still normalizes $uri before forwarding. The Fix Use $request_uri inside an if block. Unlike $uri , $request_uri holds the raw, undecoded URI exactly as the client sent it — nginx never touches it. nginx # RabbitMQ: API paths — use $request_uri to preserve %2F (never decoded by nginx) location ~* ^/rabbitmq/api/ { if ($request_uri ~* "^/rabbitmq/(.*)") { proxy_pass http://rabbitmq:15672/$1; } proxy_buffering off; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https; } # RabbitMQ: general UI (JS, CSS, static assets, non-API pages) location ~* ^/rabbitmq/ { rewrite ^/rabbitmq/(.*)$ /$1 break; proxy_pass http://rabbitmq:15672; proxy_buffering off; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https; }