How to set up proxy in .htaccess

Question

The Apache documentation states that RewriteRule and the should be put in the server configuration, but they can be put in htaccess because of shared hosting situations. I am in such a situation.

I am trying to set up a transparent proxy:

 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/foo [OR]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/bar
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [P]

This is working fine...except for redirects (like if /foo redirects to /bar). Redirects go back to example.com, not my server.

I understand the the ProxyPassReverse directive will solve this, but I get an "Internal Server Error" page when I add this to .htaccess

Unlike the Rewrite directives, ProxyPassReverse will not work in htaccess.

How do I set up a transparent proxy in shared hosting situation, or is this not possible?

(This seems reasonable, since Rewrite already gets 80% of the way there, and having a transparent proxy in one htaccess would not interfere with having it in another.)

Answer 1

Unfortunately, I'm fairly sure what you want to do isn't possible: I'm trying to do the exact same thing! From my research, I'm fairly confident it's not possible.

Put simply, you need to use ProxyPassReverse, which is only available at a VirtualHost level (or similar); not a htaccess level.

Edit: the only way I have achieved this is by also configuring the responding server/application to know it's behind a proxy, and serving pages appropriately. That is, I use .htaccess to redirect to another server as follows:

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule  (.*)  http://localhost:8080/$1  [P,L] 

Then on the application server -- in this case, a JIRA installation -- I configured the Java Tomcat/Catalina appropriately to serve pages with the proxied information:

 proxyName="my.public.address.com"
 proxyPort="80"

However, that's not completely transparent; the app server needs to serve pages in a proxied manner. It might be of some use, though.