So I have a project that runs on docker containers. I want to host a cloud storage thing on my website. There are 2 docker containers, one running Nginx, and one running my Rust backend. Nginx just serves the static files but also acts as a proxy when the path is /api and sends all requests to my Rust backend. I use the Nginx proxt because for me it is easier to handle HTTPS for just one service than to do it for all.

To authenticate for the cloud storage I just want the client to send the auth token in the first request over their connection and then my backend would successfully authenticate them and continue on reusing this TCP connection or just close the connection if authentication fails. This is so I dont have to auth on every request.

But since the connection is routed through an Nginx proxy, it’s actually 2 connections. One from the client to Nginx, and another from Nginx to the backend. Ive looked it up and Nginx can do keep alive connections, but the behavior is not deterministic and can be random. So I take it that means that a browser-nginx connection will not always correspond to the same nginx-backend connection and vice versa? Will Nginx just randomly close connections if it decides so? I’d like to hear some of you more experienced Nginx guys’ answers to this, the docs on the net are pretty nonexistent for this topic, at least in my experience. Would it be better to just send the auth token on every request? Or write a proxy with the behavior I need from scratch myself?