Apache - Reverse Proxy and HTTP 302 status message

Question

My team is trying to setup an Apache reverse proxy from a customer's site into one of our web applications.

http://www.example.com/app1/some-path maps to http://internal1.example.com/some-path

Inside our application we use struts and have redirect = true set on certain actions in order to provide certain functionality. The 302 status messages from these re-directs cause the user to break out of the proxy resulting in an error page for the end user.

HTTP/1.1 302 Found Location: http://internal.example.com/some-path/redirect

Is there any way to setup the reverse proxy in apache so that the redirects work correctly?

http://www.example.com/app1/some-path/redirect

Answer 1

There is an article titled Running a Reverse Proxy in Apache that seems to address your problem. It even uses the same example.com and /app1 that you have in your example. Go to the "Configuring the Proxy" section for examples on how to use ProxyPassReverse.

Answer 2

Basically, ProxyPassReverse should take care of rewriting the Location header for you, as Kevin Hakanson pointed out.

One pitfall I have encountered is missing the trailing slash in the url argument. Make sure to use:

ProxyPassReverse / http://internal1.example.com/some-path/

(note the trailing slash!)