Sending redirect in Tomcat web application behind a Apache 2 proxy (mod_proxy)

Question

I have a web application on tomcat http://localhost:8080/WebApp/

The I have configrued Apache 2 (mod_proy) so that the web application is directly acces

Answer 1

I also had this problem and spent some time on it. I believe that if you change your apache httpd configuration to the following your redirect will work:

    ProxyPreserveHost On

    ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/WebApp/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost/WebApp/

    ProxyPassReverseCookiePath /WebApp /

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.

As a footnote: This also works with you want to change your webapps context. Say you wanted to change the publicly visible context to context you can use the following:

    ProxyPreserveHost On

    ProxyPass /context/ http://localhost:8080/WebApp/
    ProxyPassReverse /context/ http://localhost/WebApp/

    ProxyPassReverseCookiePath /WebApp /context

For reference, I found this blog post extremely helpful: Reverse Proxying Tomcat Web Applications Behind Apache