Apache use case

Question

I use Apache to serve several sites to the world on my home server on port 443 using an SSL certificate. Last night I installed a linux binary that serves a site only on a port defined via its config file. It is not possible for me to have Apache serve the site directly.

So this site is hosted on http://127.0.0.1:8081/ but I would like to hide it behind Apache over 443 so that I can access it via https://myserver.duckdns.org/webapp/

I have tried this so far in my site config file but it has not worked:

ProxyRequests off
<Proxy *>
        allow from all
</Proxy>

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/(.*) /webapp/$1 [P]

<Location /webapp/>
        ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:8081/
        ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:8081/
</Location>

Any idea how I can do this?

I thought I could do this using ProxyPass and RewriteRules but I cannot seem to get it to work properly.

Thanks so much in advance!

Answer 1

Your rewrite rules a) have the wrong target and 2) are redundant.

RewriteRule with [P] is meant to be used as an alternative to ProxyPass, not together with it. The rewrite destination of a [P] rule would be the remote webapp URL, not a local one. For example, you could use this:

RewriteRule ^/webapp/(.*) http://127.0.0.1:8081/$1 [P]

or this:

ProxyPass /webapp/ http://127.0.0.1:8081/

or this:

<Location /webapp/>
    ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:8081/
</Location>

(Note: The Apache documentation recommends using ProxyPass whenever possible.)

Your <Proxy *> block is also unnecessary, because it only applies to forward proxying, where the client specifies the proxy destination (which you have disabled).