Hi,
Thanks a million for guiding me through these hoops, and your patience
with my confused anxiety to get this sorted out. It now works (of
course) with these settings, and allows for a quite nice compromise.
I'll briefly summarize problem and solution, if it can help others.
The starting point was that I needed to reverse proxy Tomcat webapps
behind Apache, with the Tomcat running on a non-public port.
Additionally, some Tomcat apps need access to the host name of the
original request, in order to generate working links. In order to avoid
the problem that the proxied Tomcat doesn't 'see' the 'proxy' prefix of
the original request, I decided to mirror that prefix for my Tomcat apps
as well, and settle for following Apache proxy configuration:
ProxyPreserveHost on
ProxyPass/apps/ http://localhost:8082/apps/
ProxyPassReverse/apps/ http://mydomain/apps/
(note: the proxy domain in the second argument of ProxyPassReverse makes
sure that location headers for redirects by the Tomcat apps are
rewritten correctly by mod_proxy).
Therefore, the Tomcat apps must be made accessible at e.g.
http://localhost:8082/apps/my_app/, with the /app/ prefix before the
actual name of the web app. This can be done easily by renaming the
physical folder or WAR filename containing the web app, by adding the
prefix, followed by a hash character (#) before the actual name of the
application, e.g.: F:\tomcatApps\apps#my_app. This works well, except
for Cocoon-based web apps, which choke on the hash in the filename.
Hence, for those apps, following configuration provides a workaround:
1. move the folder or WAR file containing the web app outside of
the host's appBase path, e.g.: F:\cocoonApps\my_app
2. add a file ${catalina.base}\conf\Catalina\[host
name]\[prefix]#[app name].xml, e.g.:
${catalina.base}\conf\Catalina\localhost\apps#my_app.xml, with following
content:
<Context docBase="F:/cocoonApps/my_app"/>
No further modifications of ${catalina.base}\conf\server.xml are needed.
Again, thanks for the great help!
Ron
