Moving APIs efficiently - api

Question

I currently have APIs running under http://example.com/api/v3/ and I want to move the APIs to a different server at http://exampleapi.com/v3.
I first thought about creating a location block in nginx to handle the requests such as:
location ~*/api/(v[0-9]+/[a-zA-Z0-9_]+) {
return 301 $scheme://exampleapi.com/$1;
}
However, using a REST client, the requests are being received as GET requests not POST. Same thing using a browser (Firefox).
I have tried the proxy pass but I was not able to make it work. This is what I tried:
location ~*/api/(v[0-9]+/[a-zA-Z0-9_]+) {
proxy_pass http://exampleapi.com/$1;
# proxy_redirect http://exampleapi.com/ /;
proxy_read_timeout 60s;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}
I am getting 502 or 500.
What is the best way to achieve moving the APIs?

Answer 1

After debugging locally the same issue, I found out that I cannot proxy pass to a domain, but only to IP address as there is no resolver to resolve this domain.
Hence I created a new server block for exampleapi.com to listen on a port, and proxy passed to that port, such as:
location ~*/api/(v[0-9]+/[a-zA-Z0-9_]+) {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:4545/$1;
proxy_read_timeout 60s;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}