Deploy a Clerk app behind a proxy

When deploying a Clerk app behind a proxy, you must forward two headers:

• X-Forwarded-Host - The host of the request.
• X-Forwarded-Proto - The protocol of the request.

Here are some common platforms and servers that require header proxying:

• nginx⁠
• Caddy⁠
• Docker⁠
• AWS Amplify⁠

nginx configuration example

The following can be added to your nginx configuration to forward the headers to your application.

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;

Test header forwarding

To test if the headers are forwarded correctly, you can console log them to check what their values are. They are available on the request object.

export default clerkMiddleware(
  (auth, req) => {
    console.log('=========================')
    console.log('Request Headers')
    console.log('x-forwarded-host', req.headers.get('x-forwarded-host'))
    console.log('x-forwarded-proto', req.headers.get('x-forwarded-proto'))
    console.log('=========================')
  },
  { debug: debugStatus },
)

The X-Forwarded-Host header should return the same domain as the one you configured on the Domains⁠ page in the Clerk Dashboard. The X-Forwarded-Proto header should return https as Clerk requires this value to be https for production instances.

Here is an example result:

=========================
Request Headers
x-forwarded-host example.com
x-forwarded-proto https
=========================