August 9, 2007
Using a reverse Proxy with a subdomain
So let’s see, what I need is that every request to a certain subdomain to be mapped to another server, with a private IP-Address. This is great because I only expose parts of my server to the Network that I want.
First things first: in the apache configuration, which is usually located at /etc/sysconfig/apache2 edit the APACHE_OPTS to contain -D REVERSE, -D PROXY and -D PROXY_HTML (actually the last one’s not needed as we wont be adjusting any URLs, but let’s keep it anyway).
APACHE2_OPTS="-D DEFAULT_VHOST -D PHP5 -D PERL -D PROXY_HTML -D REVERSE -D PROXY"
Now that we have enabled the proxy stuff, we can start configuring it. In the vhost directory (something like /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/) create a new file that will hold the configurationfor the subdomain:
<virtualhost your-ip-here>
DocumentRoot /srv/www/subdomain/htdocs
ServerName subdomain.domain.tld
ServerAdmin webmaster@subdomain.domain.tld
AccessFileName .htaccess
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /srv/www/subdomain/cgi-bin/
ServerAlias subdomain.domain.tld sudomain
<directory /srv/www/subdomain/htdocs>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</directory>
<directory /srv/www/subdomain/cgi-bin>
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Options ExecCGI
Allow from all
</directory>
</virtualhost>
Ok so by bow we have created the new subdomain, just to let apache shut up about missing folders we’ll create the required folder:
mkdir -p /srv/www/subdomain/{htdocs,cgi-bin}
What’s missing now? Right, the reverse Proxy 
so we have to add two new lines to the definition above:
ProxyPass / http://internal-ip-address/
ProxyPassReverse / http://internal-ip-address/That’s it! Just put the above before the Closing VirtualHost tag and it should work just fine.
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Chris Messina takes an in depth look at Adobes recent donation of Source Code to the Open Source Community (this is to be read as Mozilla).
