10/15/2010 Running a Reverse Proxy with Apache:

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Running a Reverse Proxy in Apache

In 2003, Nick Kew released a new module that complements Apache's mod_proxy and
is essential for reverse-proxying. Since then he gets regular questions and requests for
help on proxying with Apache. In this article he attempts to give a comprehensive
overview of the proxying and mod_proxy_html

This article was originally published at ApacheWeek in January 2004, and moved to
ApacheTutor with minor updates in October 2006. The current revision was made in
October 2009 and incorporates updates in Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy_html 3.1.

Notes

Sorry, I've turned off anonymous annotations, due to an unusual level of abuse.
Existing non-spam annotations are preserved.

Web Proxies

A proxy server is a gateway for users to the Web at large. Users configure the proxy in their
browser settings, and all HTTP requests are routed via the proxy. Proxies are typically operated
by ISPs and network administrators, and serve several purposes: for example,

to speed access to the Web by caching pages fetched, so that popular pages don't have to
be re-fetched for every user who views them.
to enable controlled access to the web for users behind a firewall.
to filter or transform web content.

Reverse Proxies

A reverse proxy is a gateway for servers, and enables one web server to provide content from
another transparently. As with a standard proxy, a reverse proxy may serve to improve
performance of the web by caching; this is a simple way to mirror a website. Loadbalancing a
heavy-duty application, or protecting a vulnerable one, are other common usages. But the most
common reason to run a reverse proxy is to enable controlled access from the Web at large to
servers behind a firewall.

The proxied server may be a webserver itself, or it may be an application server using a different
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protocol, or an application server with just rudimentary HTTP that needs to be shielded from the
web at large. Since 2004, reverse proxying has been the preferred method of deploying
JAVA/Tomcat applications on the Web, replacing the old mod_jk (itself a special-purpose
reverse proxy module).

Proxying with Apache

The standard Apache module mod_proxy supports both types of proxy operation. Under Apache
1.x, mod_proxy only supported HTTP/1.0, but from Apache 2.0, it supports HTTP/1.1. This
distinction is particularly important in a proxy, because one of the most significant changes between
the two protocol versions is that HTTP/1.1 introduces rich new cache control mechanisms.

Apache 2.2 brings major improvements over Apache 2.0 in both proxying and cacheing, and is
also the first version to support load-balancing as standard. If you are using an older Apache
version, it is strongly recommended you upgrade.

For users of Unix-family platforms, you have a choice of MPM. A threaded MPM (Worker or
Event) is likely to perform best in a proxy, especially if you need to support large numbers of
clients. If you have an application that is not compatible with a threaded MPM, you may want to
consider putting that on a different server (which could be another Apache instance on the same
hardware), unless your load is too low to matter.

The Apache Proxy Modules

So far, we have spoken loosely of mod_proxy. However, it's a little more complicated than that.
In keeping with Apache's modular architecture, mod_proxy is itself modular, and a typical proxy
server will need to enable several modules. Those relevant to proxying and this article include:

mod_proxy: The core module deals with proxy infrastructure and configuration and
managing a proxy request.
mod_proxy_http: This handles fetching documents with HTTP and HTTPS.
mod_proxy_ftp: This handles fetching documents with FTP.
mod_proxy_connect: This handles the CONNECT method for secure (SSL) tunneling.
mod_proxy_ajp: This handles the AJP protocol for Tomcat and similar backend servers.
mod_proxy_balancer implements clustering and load-balancing over multiple backends.
mod_cache, mod_disk_cache, mod_mem_cache: These deal with managing a document
cache. To enable caching requires mod_cache and one or both of disk_cache and
mem_cache.
mod_proxy_html: This rewrites HTML links into a proxy's address space.
mod_xml2enc: This supports internationalisation (i18n) on behalf of mod_proxy_html and
other markup-filtering modules. space.
mod_headers: This modifies HTTP request and response headers.
mod_deflate: Negotiates compression with clients and backends.

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Having mentioned the modules, I'm going to ignore caching for the remainder of this article. You
may want to add it if you are concerned about the load on your network or origin servers, but the
details are outside the scope of this article. I'm also going to ignore all non-HTTP protocols, and
load balancing.

Building Apache for Proxying

Note: if you are installing Apache from a package, you will just need to install packages for
Apache, libxml2 and third-party modules according to your distributor's conventions, which may
differ from what is described here.

Most of the above modules are included in the core Apache distribution. They can easily be
enabled in the Apache build process. For example:

$ ./configure --enable-so --enable-mods-shared="proxy cache ssl all"

$ make
# make install

Of course, you may want other build options too, and you could just as well build the modules as
static.

If you are adding proxying to an existing installation, you should use apxs instead:

# apxs -c -i [module-name].c
noting that mod_proxy itself is in two source files
(mod_proxy.c and proxy_util.c).

This leaves mod_proxy_html and mod_xml2enc, which are third-party modules, and require a
third-party library libxml2. At the time of writing, libxml2 is installed as standard or packaged for
most operating systems (except Windows - see below). If you don't have it, you can download it
from xmlsoft.org and install it yourself. For the purposes of this article, we'll assume libxml2 is
installed as /usr/lib/libxml2.so, with headers in /usr/include/libxml2/libxml/.

1. Check libxml2 is installed. The version should no longer be an issue, but note that versions
before 2.5.10 had a bug that could cause mod_proxy_html to DoS, and version 2.6 is
required for some error recovery when parsing data containing invalid byte sequences.
2. Download mod_proxy_html and mod_xml2enc from http://apache.webthing.com/
3. Build mod_proxy_html and mod_xml2enc with apxs:

# apxs -c -I/usr/include/libxml2 -I. -i mod_proxy_html.c

# apxs -c -I/usr/include/libxml2 -I. -i mod_xml2enc.c

A Reverse Proxy Scenario

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Company example.com has a website at www.example.com, which has a public IP address and
DNS entry, and can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet.

The company also has a couple of application servers which have private IP addresses and
unregistered DNS entries, and are inside the firewall. The application servers are visible within the
network - including the webserver, as "internal1.example.com" and "internal2.example.com", But
because they have no public DNS entries, anyone looking at internal1.example.com from outside
the company network will get a "no such host" error.

A decision is taken to enable Web access to the application servers. But they should not be
exposed to the Internet directly, instead they should be integrated with the webserver, so that
http://www.example.com/app1/any-path-here is mapped internally to
http://internal1.example.com/any-path-here and http://www.example.com/app2/other-path-here is
mapped internally to http://internal2.example.com/other-path-here. This is a typical reverse-proxy
situation.

Configuring the Proxy

As with any modules, the first thing to do is to load them in httpd.conf (this is not necessary if we
build them statically into Apache).

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so

LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
#LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so
#LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so
LoadFile /usr/lib/libxml2.so
LoadModule xml2enc_module modules/mod_xml2enc.so
LoadModule proxy_html_module modules/mod_proxy_html.so

For windows users this is slightly different: you'll need to load libxml2.dll rather than libxml2.so,
and you'll probably need to load iconv.dll and xlib.dll as prerequisites to libxml2 (you can
download them from zlatkovic.com, the same site that maintains windows binaries of libxml2). The
LoadFile directive is the same.

Of course, you may not need all the modules. Two that are not required in our typical scenario are
shown commented out above.

Having loaded the modules, we can now configure the Proxy. But before doing so, we have an
important security warning:

Do Not set "ProxyRequests On". Setting ProxyRequests On turns your server into an Open
Proxy. There are 'bots scanning the Web for open proxies. When they find you, they'll start using
you to route around blocks and filters to access questionable or illegal material. At worst, they
might be able to route email spam through your proxy. Your legitimate traffic will be swamped,
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and you'll find your server getting blocked by things like family filters.

Of course, you may also want to run a forward proxy with appropriate security measures, but that
lies outside the scope of this article. The author runs both forward and reverse proxies on the same
server (but under different Virtual Hosts).

The fundamental configuration directive to set up a reverse proxy is ProxyPass. We use it to set up
proxy rules for each of the application servers:

ProxyPass /app1/ http://internal1.example.com/

ProxyPass /app2/ http://internal2.example.com/

The [P] flag to mod_rewrite offers an alternative to Proxypass, but this is more complex, and may
in some instances degrade performance by making it impossible for Apache to use persistent
proxy connections.

Now as soon as Apache re-reads the configuration (the recommended way to do this is with
"apachectl graceful"), proxy requests will work, so http://www.example.com/app1/some-path
maps to http://internal1.example.com/some-path as required.

However, this is not the whole story. ProxyPass just sends traffic straight through. So when the
application servers generate references to themselves (or to other internal addresses), they will be
passed straight through to the outside world, where they won't work.

For example, an HTTP redirection often takes place when a user (or author) forgets a trailing slash
in a URL. So the response to a request for http://www.example.com/app1/foo proxies to
http://internal.example.com/foo which generates a response:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Location: http://internal.example.com/foo/
(etc)

But from the outside world, the net effect of this is a "No such host" error. The proxy needs to re-
map the Location header to its own address space and return a valid URL

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Location: http://www.example.com/app1/foo/

The command to enable such rewrites in the HTTP Headers is ProxyPassReverse. The Apache
documentation suggests the form:

ProxyPassReverse /app1/ http://internal1.example.com/

ProxyPassReverse /app2/ http://internal2.example.com/

However, there is a slightly more complex alternative form that I recommend as more robust:

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<Location /app1/>
ProxyPassReverse /
</Location>
<Location /app2/>
ProxyPassReverse /
</Location>

Note: this currently fails due to a regression in mod_proxy. It does the right thing with
the ProxyPassReverse balancer:/// form if you have a balancer: this is a workaround.
Note too that the three slashes are not a typo! Without a balancer, please apply the
patch from the bug report or use the other form.

The reason for recommending this is that a problem arises with some application servers. Suppose
for example we have a redirect:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Location: /some/path/to/file.html

This is a violation of the HTTP protocol and so should never happen: HTTP only permits full
URLs in Location headers. However, it is also a source of much confusion, not least because the
CGI spec has a similar Location header with different semantics where relative paths are allowed.
There are a lot of broken servers out there! In this instance, the first form of ProxyPassReverse
will return the incorrect response

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Location: /some/path/to/file.html

which, even allowing for error-correcting browsers, is outside the Proxy's address space and
won't work. The second form fixes this to

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

Location: /app2/some/path/to/file.html

which is still broken, but will at least work in error-correcting browsers. Most browsers will deal
with this.

If your backend server uses cookies, you may also need the ProxyPassReverseCookiePath and
ProxyPassReverseCookieDomain directives. These are similar to ProxyPassReverse, but deal
with the different form of cookie headers. These require mod_proxy from Apache 2.2
(recommended), or a patched version of 2.0.

Fixing HTML Links

As we have seen, ProxyPassReverse remaps URLs in the HTTP headers to ensure they work
from outside the company network. There is, however, a separate problem when links appear in
HTML pages served. Consider the following cases:
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1. <a href="somefile.html">This link will be resolved by the browser and will work
correctly.</a>
2. <a href="/otherfile.html">This link will be resolved by the browser to
http://www.example.com/otherfile.html, which is incorrect.</a>
3. <a href="http://internal1.example.com/">This link will resolve to "no such host" for the
browser.</a>

The same problem of course applies to included content such as images, stylesheets, scripts or
applets, and other contexts where URLs occur in HTML.

To fix this requires us to parse the HTML and rewrite the links. This is the purpose of
mod_proxy_html. It works as an output filter, parsing the HTML and rewriting links as it is served.
Two basic configuration directives are required to set it up:

ProxyHTMLEnable On
This activates mod_proxy_html (and mod_xml2enc if available) for the request, and enables
ProxyHTMLURLMap and other directives.
ProxyHTMLURLMap from-pattern to-pattern [flags] [cond]
In its basic form, this has a similar purpose and semantics to ProxyPassReverse.
Additionally, an extended form is available to enable search-and-replace rewriting of URLs
within Scripts and Stylesheets.

Note that this is a change from earlier versions of mod_proxy_html and of this tutorial.
The old method is deprecated. The reason for the change is that ProxyHTMLEnable configures
both mod_proxy_html and mod_xml2enc and ensures they interact correctly: a task that would
otherwise be far more complex.

How it works

mod_proxy_html is based on a SAX parser: specifically the HTMLparser module from libxml2
running in SAX mode (any other parse mode would of course be very much slower, especially for
larger documents). It has full knowledge of all URI attributes that can occur in HTML 4 and
XHTML 1. Whenever a URL is encountered, it is matched against applicable
ProxyHTMLURLMap directives. If it starts with any from-pattern, that will be rewritten to the to-
pattern. Rules are applied in the reverse order to their appearance in httpd.conf, and matching
stops as soon as a match is found.

Here's how we set up a reverse proxy for HTML. Firstly, full links to the internal servers should
be rewritten regardless of where they arise, so we have:

ProxyHTMLURLMap http://internal1.example.com /app1

ProxyHTMLURLMap http://internal2.example.com /app2

Note that in this instance we omitted the "trailing" slash. Since the matching logic is starts-with, we
use the minimal matching pattern. We have now globally fixed case 3 above.
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Case 2 above requires a little more care. Because the link doesn't include the hostname, the
rewrite rule must be context-sensitive. As with ProxyPassReverse above, we deal with that using
<Location>

<Location /app1/>
ProxyHTMLURLMap / /app1/
</Location>
<Location /app2/>
ProxyHTMLURLMap / /app2/
</Location>

Debugging your Proxy Configuration

The above is a simple case taken from mod_proxy_html version 1. With the more complex
URLmapping and rewriting enabled by Version 2, you may need a bit of help setting up a complex
ruleset, perhaps involving a series of complex regexps, chained anc blocking rules, etc. To help
with setting up and troubleshooting your rulesets, mod_proxy_html 2 provides a "debug" mode, in
which all the 'interesting' things it does are written to the Apache error log. To analyse and fix your
rulesets, set

ProxyHTMLLogVerbose On
LogLevel Info (or LogLevel Debug)

Now run your testcases through your rulesets, and examine the apache error log for details of
exactly how it was processed.

Do not leave ProxyHTMLLogVerbose On for normal use. Although the effect is marginal, it is an
overhead.

Extended URL Mapping

The previous section sets up remapping of HTML URLs, but leaves any URL encountered in a
Stylesheet or Script untouched. mod_proxy_html doesn't parse Javascript or CSS, so dealing with
URLs in them requires text-based search-and-replace. This is enabled by the directive
ProxyHTMLExtended On.

Because the extended mode is text-based, it can no longer guarantee to match exact URLs. It's up
to you to devise matching rules that can pick out URLs, just as if you were writing an old-
fashioned Perl or PHP regexp-based filter (though of course it's still massively more efficient than
performing search-and-replace on an entire document in-memory). To help with this,
ProxyHTMLExtended supports both simple text-based and regular expression search-and-
replace, according to the flags. You can also use the flags to specify rules separately for HTML
links, scripting events, and embedded scripts and stylesheets.

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A second key consideration with extended URL mapping is that whereas an HTML link contains
exactly one URL, a script or stylesheet may contain many. So instead of stopping after a
successful match, the processor will apply all applicable mapping rules. This can be stopped with
the L (last) flag.

Dealing with multimedia content

We just set up a proxy to parse and where necessary correct HTML. But of course, the web isn't
just HTML. Surely feeding non-HTML content through an HTML parser is at best inefficient, if
not totally broken?

Yes indeed. mod_proxy_html deals with that by checking the Content-Type header, and removing
itself from the processing chain when a document is not HTML (text/html) or XHTML
(application/xhtml+xml). This happens in the filter initialisation phase, before any data are
processed by the filter.

But that still leaves a problem. Consider compressed HTML:

Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip

Feeding that into an HTML parser is clearly broken!

There are two solutions to this. One is to uncompress the incoming data with mod_deflate.
Uncompressing and compressing content radically reduces network traffic, but increases the
processor load on the proxy. It is worthwhile if and only if bandwidth between the proxy and the
backend is at a premium: this is common on the 'net at large, but unlikely to be the case on a
company internal network.

SetOutputFilter INFLATE;DEFLATE

(note that ProxyHTMLEnable correctly inserts the proxy-html filter between INFLATE and
DEFLATE).

The alternative solution is to refuse to support compression. Stripping any Accept-Encoding

request header does the job. So invoking mod_headers, we add a directive

RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding

This should only apply to the Proxy, so we put it inside our <Location> containers.

A similar situation arises in the case of encrypted (https) content. But in this case, there is no such
workaround: if we could decrypt the data to process it then so could any other man-in-the-middle,
and the security would be worthless. This can only be circumvented by installing mod_ssl and a
certificate on the proxy, so that the actual secure session is between the browser and the proxy,
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not the origin server.

The Complete Configuration

We are now in a position to write a complete configuration for our reverse proxy. Here is a bare
minimum, that ignores extended urlmapping:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so

LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
LoadFile /usr/lib/libxml2.so
LoadModule proxy_html_module modules/mod_proxy_html.so
LoadModule xml2enc_module modules/mod_xml2enc.so

ProxyRequests off
ProxyPass /app1/ http://internal1.example.com/
ProxyPass /app2/ http://internal2.example.com/
ProxyHTMLURLMap http://internal1.example.com /app1
ProxyHTMLURLMap http://internal2.example.com /app2

<Location /app1/>
ProxyPassReverse /
ProxyHTMLEnable On
ProxyHTMLURLMap / /app1/
RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
</Location>

<Location /app2/>
ProxyPassReverse /
ProxyHTMLEnable On
ProxyHTMLURLMap / /app2/
RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
</Location>

Of course, there's more than one way to do it. Our configuration would actually have been simpler
if we'd used Virtual Hosts for each application server. But that takes you beyond the realm of
Apache configuration and into DNS. If you don't fully understand that (or if you think "why can't I
see my domain" is a webserver question), then please don't try using virtual hosts for this.

NOTE

If you are using a mod_proxy_html version older than 3.1, there is no ProxyHTMLEnable
directive, and you'll have to insert the filter with Apache's standard directives: for example
SetOutputFilter proxy-html

Further topics

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Cacheing

We haven't dealt with cachcing in this article. In a company-intranet situation, the connection from
the proxy to the application servers is the local LAN, which is probably fast and has ample
capacity. In such cases, caching at the proxy will have little effect, and can probably be omitted.

If we want to cache pages, we can of course do so with mod_cache But that is beyond the scope
of this article.

Load Balancing

If the backend is an application that's heavy on the computer, we may wish to spread the load
across multiple machines. Apache enables this with mod_proxy_loadbalancer. Current
development versions (and in future stable versions 2.4.x) have additional clustering and
monitoring support.

Content Transformation and Aggregation

mod_proxy_html is one of many modules that can be deployed on a proxy to rewrite contents on
the fly. Other examples include more general-purpose content transformation, aggregation (e.g
with server-side includes or edge-side includes), XML processing such as XInclude and XSLT,
and even embedded scripting and database queries.

Filtering and Security

A reverse proxy is not the natural place for a "family filter", but is ideal for defining access controls
and imposing security restrictions. We could, for example, configure the proxy to recognise a
custom header from an origin server and block content based on it. This delegates control to the
application servers.

If you are interested in this subject, another third-party module mod_security offers powerful and
sophisicated protection.

Questions and Answers

(Q) Where can I get the software?

(A) Most of it from the obvious place, http://httpd.apache.org/
mod_proxy_html and mod_xml2enc are available from http://apache.webthing.com/
libxml2 is available from http://xmlsoft.org/. Windows users should read libxml2.dll for
libxml2.so, and can obtain it together with the prerequisites iconv.dll and zlib.dll from Igor
Zlatkovic's site, http://www.zlatkovich.com/.
Finally, mod_security is available from http://www.modsecurity.org/
(Q) Can I get a binaries of software ?
(A) If there's no link at the websites above, ask the provider of your operating system or
distribution. The author can compile it on different platforms but does not provide a free

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compilation service.
(Q) What is httpd.conf? My apache has different configuration files.
(A) Some distribution packagers mess about with the Apache configuration. If this applies to
you, the details should be documented by your distributor, and have nothing to do with Apache
itself! Substitute your distributions choice of configuration file for httpd.conf in the above
discussion, or create your own proxy.conf file and Include it.
(Q) You mentioned apxs and apachectl. Where do I find them?
(A) They're part of a standard Apache installation (except on Windows). If you don't have them
or can't find them, that's a problem with your installation. The easiest solution is probably to
download a complete Apache from httpd.apache.org.
(Q) Does mod_proxy_html deal with Javascript links?
(A) From mod_proxy_html 2.0, yes!
(Q) The proxy appears to change my HTML?
(A) It doesn't really, but it may appear to. Here are the possible causes:

1. Changing the FPI (the <!DOCTYPE ...> line) may affect some browsers. FIX: set the
doctype explicitly if this bothers you.

2. mod_proxy_html has the side-effect of transforming content to utf-8 (Unicode) encoding.

This should not be a problem: utf-8 is well-supported by browsers, and offers
comprehensive support for internationalisation. If it appears to cause a problem, that's
almost certainly a bug in the application server, or possibly a misconfigured browser.
FIX: filter through mod_charset_lite to your chosen charset.

3. mod_proxy_html will perform some minor normalisations. If your HTML includes

elements that are closed implicitly, it will explicitly close them. In other words:

<body>
<p>Hello, World!
</body>

will be transformed to

<body>
<p>Hello, World!</p>
<body>

If this affects the rendition in your browser, it almost certainly means you are using
malformed HTML and relying on error-correction in a browser. FIX: validate your
HTML! The online Page Valet service will both validate and show your markup
normalised by the DTD, while a companion tool AccessValet will show markup
normalised by the same parser used in the proxy, and highlight other problems. Both are
available at http://valet.webthing.com/

Owner niq, Last Updated: Fri Dec 25 15:37:50 2009.

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