Question

I am trying to launch a localhost application on Ubuntu with Apache and proxy it to Tomcat so that I can use .jsp pages in my application. It seems that this is possible and I think that I am pretty close, but I can’t seem to get it quite right. Any help is greatly appreciated! I’ve never used apache or tomcat before, so please don’t hate me if any of this seems stupid.

I’ve got Apache hosting a site at localhost with this code for the host:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName localhost
ServerAlias test.com

DocumentRoot /var/www/test.com/helloworld
<Directory />
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www/>
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
</Directory>

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
<Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
    AllowOverride None
    Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn

CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
<Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order deny,allow
    Deny from all
    Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

This allows me to successfully navigate to my page hello.html by typing localhost/hello.html in the URL. I have read that from this point, I need to insert some code such as:

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On

<Proxy *>
  Order deny,allow
  Allow from all
</Proxy>

ProxyPass /(appname) ajp://localhost:8009/(appname)
ProxyPassReverse /(appname) ajp://localhost:8009/(appname)

and then Tomcat should get the requests. In this case, what would the appname be? My page is located at /var/www/test.com/helloworld/hello.html, so I thought it would be “helloworld”, but that does not work. When I leave the appname blank, I see the Tomcat “Congratulations, you’ve successfully installed Tomcat.” when I navigate to localhost, but cannot find my page.

Please help. This is slowly becoming a nightmare. Thanks!

Answer 1

I figured it out. This is super dumb, but I was trying to load the application from /var/www rather than housing it within the tomcat directories. /facepalm

The proxy code I posted in the original question is the only code needed in the virtualhost. Thanks everyone.