I recently ran into a situation where I had a server with Apache on it that was already hosting a few PHP sites using VirtualHost mappings, but I now wanted to add a new Tomcat-hosted site to the same machine.
In a way, what I wanted was to setup a new VirtualHost entry on Apache to handle the new domain but also make use of the ProxyPass and ProxyReversePass directives to have Apache transparently pass-through traffic from the VirtualHost domain to Tomcat running in the background on some non-conflicting port, like port 80.
At first I didn’t know how to approach this problem; the Googling I was doing was showing me how to use the VirtualHost directive (which I already had a few of) or the ProxyPass/ProxyPassReverse… but not both together.
I thought maybe what I was trying to do didn’t make sense, until I came across an article on the Atlassian website for suggestions on how to setup one of their products.
It seems that in order to use both of these constructs together in Apache, it’s as straight forward as you might thing… you simply put your ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse mappings inside your VirtualHost declaration, like so:
<VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin john@doe.com ServerName <my domain>.com ServerAlias www.<my domain>.com ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/<web-app context root>/ ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/<web-app context root>/ ErrorLog logs/<my domain>.com-error_log CustomLog logs/<my domain>.com-access_log combined </VirtualHost>
NOTE: Don’t forget the trailing / at the end of the mapped URL for ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse; otherwise your traffic will get redirected to invalid URLs like http://mydomain.comblahblah, instead of /blahblah.
Notice the ProxyPass mappings to the root (/) which is safe to do since it’s occuring inside the VirtualHost. Very cool trick and I owe thanks to Marc Chung of OpenRain getting me started down the right Apache-directive-path when I began researching this.
Update #1: User G. Gibson below noted that using the settings above didn’t work for him and he had to modify them slightly, in case any other readers are running into this hickup, here are the settings G. Gibson used (thanks G!):
RewriteEngine on
# Tomcat rewrite rule – as route
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /tomcatAppName*
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ http://localhost:8080$1 [P]
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/
# Rails Server
ServerName myFunkyServer.myDomain.net
ServerAlias http://www.myFunkyServer.myDomain.net
DocumentRoot /path/to/railsapp/public
ServerAdmin admin@myDomain.net
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog /path/to/railsapp/logs/error.log
CustomLog /path/to/railsapp/logs/access.log combined
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
Loading ...
15. September 2008 at 3:59 am
this is fine for sites with no session state – i have this fie on a site with no security as oon as i added spring security it does not work. the proxy needs to go to the same contexts as the war file
28. February 2009 at 2:41 pm
Mike, proxypass works fine with sessions in tomcat, but you have use the ajp connector. You can set the ajp port in your tomcat server.xml file and here is how you connect to it in your apache configuration:
ProxyPass / ajp://localhost:/
ProxyPassReverse / ajp://localhost:/
Hope this helps, the article helped me accomplish the rest of what I needed. Huge thanks!
29. May 2009 at 5:49 am
This works for me. But my only problem is some urls in my application still use the webapp context and not “/”. Most of this URL’s where generated by tags. Any idea how to solve this? Thanks!
30. May 2009 at 8:34 am
Milo,
Double check that the links aren’t being generated with something like < %= request.getContextRoot() %> + because that would be easy to correct.
If that’s not the case I think what you’ll need is some url rewrite rules for paths starting with /webcontext/… to just /…
31. May 2009 at 11:14 pm
I solved my problem by deploying my webapps to the root context “/” of the web container. Then I configured the webapps to have Virtual Hosts. I’m using Jetty, but I’ve also tested in on Tomcat. On Apache, I configured it to use:
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/
I did not indicate any webapp context root in the URLs. Basically, Apache will forward all requests to the URL. It will be the job of the web container to figure out which webapp it will forward the request to.
10. June 2009 at 8:13 am
hi ryhad… i thank you very much for your post. I need something more.. i need to do something like this:
ServerAdmin john@doe.com
ServerName .com
ProxyPass / http://somewhere...
ProxyPassReverse / http://somewhere...
ProxyPass /foo/ http://somewhere-else...
ProxyPassReverse /foo/ http://somewhere-else...
how could i do??? it seems not to work ( / requests “override” /foo/ requests)
thank you in advance!
29. June 2009 at 8:21 am
try:
ServerAdmin john@doe.com
ServerName .com
ProxyPass /foo/ http://somewhere-else... [L]
ProxyPassReverse /foo/ http://somewhere-else…L
ProxyPass / http://somewhere...
ProxyPassReverse / http://somewhere...
29. December 2009 at 11:40 am
Hrm, none of that worked for me – but this did:
RewriteEngine on
# Tomcat rewrite rule – as route
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /tomcatAppName*
RewriteRule ^(/.*)$ http://localhost:8080$1 [P]
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/
# Rails Server
ServerName myFunkyServer.myDomain.net
ServerAlias http://www.myFunkyServer.myDomain.net
DocumentRoot /path/to/railsapp/public
ServerAdmin admin@myDomain.net
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog /path/to/railsapp/logs/error.log
CustomLog /path/to/railsapp/logs/access.log combined
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
22. January 2010 at 7:54 am
G. Gibson, sorry to hear it didn’t work — maybe I missed something in there that was unique to your setup. Thanks for posting your own settings though incase others run into it!
What was happening when you used the other settings? Forwards just not working right?