apache

How to expose a web application through Apache

I did this a few times in my life, and every time it was painful to reconstruct the necessary toolset and configuration options. So, here it goes. First, enable the proxy support.

~# a2enmod proxy # utility functions
~# a2enmod proxy_http # http forwarding
~# a2enmod proxy_html # html rewriting
~# a2enmod headers # http headers rewriting

Then, assuming that your web application runs on port 3031 on the same host as Apache, and you want to make it available at the /demo url in Apache, write the following in the Apache config:

<IfModule mod_proxy.c>
  <IfModule mod_proxy_http.c>
    <IfModule mod_proxy_html.c>
      <IfModule mod_headers.c>
        ProxyRequests Off
        <Proxy *>
                Order deny,allow
                Allow from all
        </Proxy>

        ProxyPass  /demo http://localhost:3301
        ProxyPassReverse /demo http://localhost:3301
        <Location "/demo">
            # ask the localhost to return the uncompressed HTML
            RequestHeader   unset   Accept-Encoding
            # Filter Responses through mod_proxy_html
            SetOutputFilter proxy-html
            # convert URLs in CSS and JavaScript as well
            ProxyHTMLExtended On
            # convert URLs in a.hrefs
            ProxyHTMLURLMap ^/ /demo/ R 
            # convert URLs in CSS and JS
            ProxyHTMLURLMap "'/" "'/demo/" 
            # convert URLs in CSS and JS
            ProxyHTMLURLMap "\"/" "\"/demo/" 
        </Location>
      </IfModule>
    </IfModule>
  </IfModule>
</IfModule>