Apache 2 HTTPS reverse proxy with two Tomcat instances?

Question

I have a problem with configuring Apache 2 reverse proxy for Tomcat 8.

I have a server that has two Tomcat instances running, old Tomcat 7 and recently installed Tomcat 8. Tomcat 7 has a HTTP connector configured in its server.xml and it uses the port 8080, the configuration looks like this:

    <Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
           maxThreads="200"
           clientAuth="false"
           URIEncoding="UTF-8"
           useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
           scheme="http"/>

Tomcat 8 has a HTTP connector configured in its server.xml and it uses the port 8765 with the same configuration as above, just a different port.

Tomcat 7 has a REST API running in webapps/api

Tomcat 8 has a REST API running in webapps/anotherapi

The server also has Apache 2 working as a reverse proxy and it listens to port 443. The reverse proxy configuration part in ssl.conf looks like this:

<VirtualHost _default_:443>

ServerName my.server.com:443

ProxyPreserveHost On

RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"

ProxyRequests Off

SSLProxyVerify none

SSLProxyCheckPeerCN off

ProxyPass /api http://localhost:8080/api
ProxyPassReverse /api http://localhost:8080/api

ProxyPass /anotherapi http://localhost:8765/anotherapi
ProxyPassReverse /anotherapi http://localhost:8765/anotherapi

#configuration truncated

</VirtualHost>

Tomcat 7 and its reverse proxy configuration have been on the server for quite a while and it works normally, but problems occur with the new Tomcat 8.

When I try to GET https://my.server.com/api/someresource on my browser I get the expected response from my REST API on Tomcat 7, however when I try to access https://my.server.com/anotherapi/someresource I get HTTP status 404 page returned from Tomcat 7 instead of the expected response from Tomcat 8.

Any ideas why this happens? Is there something else I need to do when dealing with two Tomcat instances?

SSL module is loaded in Apache and there shouldn't be problems with my certificate.

Fuuso Fuuso · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-27T14:01:47

Figured it out myself. I also had an old ProxyPass configuration (that got truncated here) that returned localhost:8080 when accessing the root of the server (https://my.server.com/).

Apache 2 HTTPS reverse proxy with two Tomcat instances?

1 Answers