How to redirect Apache 2.2 on Windows to Tomcat (same machine)

Question

I have spent quite some time trying to figure out something apparentaly pretty trivial, but my lack of knowledge in Apache/Tomcat isn't making this easy for me.

I was asked to redirect a request coming on port 80 (Apache) to port 8080 (Tomcat.. and when that will work, to an app).

Before I changed anything, localhost:80 would show "It works" and locahost:8080 the Apache welcome page.

I did the following changes :

uncommented LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so & LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so from the httpd.conf file
uncommented Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, always in httpd.conf

In httpd-vhosts.conf, I added :

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName localhost ProxyRequests Off ProxyPreserveHost On ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080 ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080 </VirtualHost>

But when I try http://localhost, I do arrive on Apache welcome page, but all css styling, images, are missing :

I have an idea why it is not working : when I inspect my page, and look at the header i see that the link to the favicon for example is http://mydomain/myApp/images/favicon.ico, but if I copy paste that link, I will of course not find the favicon because it is not on Apache, but Tomcat (if that makes any sense). If I add the port to the URL, then it works : http://mydomain:8080/myApp/images/favicon.ico

Has this anything to do with the problem stated here : https://serverfault.com/questions/561892/how-to-handle-relative-urls-correctly-with-a-reverse-proxy ?

This is because the tomcat response headers will contain the proxy headers (i.e. the Location header is http://localhost/WebApp rather than http://localhost:8080/WebApp) because ProxyPreserveHost is switched On

So I switched it to Off :

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName localhost ProxyRequests Off ProxyPreserveHost Off ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080 ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080 </VirtualHost>

But the page still will not show correctly.

Thank you for your input.

Charlie Allen Charlie Allen · Accepted Answer · 2018-04-13T20:02:45

Just figured this one out myself. Solution is to add a / to the end of the addresses in the ProxyPass lines.

As far as I understand it, the server is trying to resolve the address literally, so when it checks for, say the docs page, which is in the webapps folder, it returns a proxy error that says that it can't resolve http://localhost:8080docs.

How to redirect Apache 2.2 on Windows to Tomcat (same machine)

1 Answers