Question

Using an Apache virtualhost and mod_proxy I want to access a java application (myapp) available in a jetty instance on port 8080.

With ProxyPass / localhost:8080/ on my apache virtualhost configuration I can access the application running in jetty with http://www.mydomain.com/myapp but I want the application to be accessed from http://www.mydomain.com.

Trying with ProxyPass / localhost:8080/myapp The application cannot be found because the request becomes http://www.mydomain.com/myappmyapp/.

Then tried with:

<Location />
        ProxyPass localhost:8080/myapp/
        SetEnv force-proxy-request-1.0 1
        SetEnv proxy-nokeepalive 1
</Location>

I can access the application but just for the first request. Subsequent requests become http://www.mydomain.com/myappmyapp/

After reading many times wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Tutorial/Apache and the apache mod_proxy docs the only way I managed to use the application properly from http://www.mydomain.com is with the following configuration:

<Location /myapp/>
        ProxyPass localhost:8080/myapp/
        SetEnv force-proxy-request-1.0 1
        SetEnv proxy-nokeepalive 1
</Location>

<Location />
        ProxyPass localhost:8080/myapp/
        SetEnv force-proxy-request-1.0 1
        SetEnv proxy-nokeepalive 1
</Location>

so the request is forwarded to the jetty application in both cases.

I am quite new to apache and jetty and I am pretty sure there is a better and more elegant way of achieving the same result.
In fact apache complains saying:

[warn] worker localhost:8080/myapp/ already used by another worker

Answer 1

The problem is that when you deploy your application in jetty with the context path /myapp, it will generate all links accordingly. Apache mod_proxy does all the rewriting at the HTTP level (headers) and won’t do anything with the response body, keeping it as it is.

If you don’t mind the /myapp sticking around, you can turn mod_rewrite on and include following two lines in your Location block:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/myapp/(.*)$ /$1 [P]

If you would like to get rid of /myapp for good, then the only option left (assuming you don’t want to waste CPU power on mod_proxy_html) is to configure virtual hosts, and deploy applications on virtual hosts with context path of /.