Apache 2.4.7 mod_proxy_wstunnel tunneling too much (HTTP as well as WS)

Solution 1:

anders' answer got me 95% of the way there.

The basic scenario:

• We have a server on newapp.example.com
• Port 8080 is running both HTTP and WebSockets
• The URL that responds to WebSockets requests is /api/socket/
• We're reverse-proxying this application as http://apps.example.com/newapp/

This is how to configure WebSockets and HTTP reverse-proxying for the above scenario in a <Location> block:

<Location /newapp/>
    ProxyPass http://newapp.example.com:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse /

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:UPGRADE} ^WebSocket$ [NC]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:CONNECTION} Upgrade$ [NC]
    RewriteRule /api/(.*) ws://newapp.example.com:8080/api/$1 [P]
</Location>

The final rewrite rule is crucial - without it, we'll pass the request /newapp/api/socket through to the WebSocket server - which it will reject.

The regex is parsing out everything after api - there might be a better way to capture that block, but this worked. We then have to remember to re-add /api/ to the final redirect URL.

Most importantly, HTTP requests continue to work after the WebSocket connection is established!

Solution 2:

I'm using apache 2.4 as a proxy in front of my spring boot app, this app serves some rest api calls, websockets (sockjs) and some static pages. I had some problems getting the websocket to work, the secret there was to add the rewrite rules you see below, now it works for me, my apache virtual host config looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:443>
  SSLEngine on
  SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/ssl/my.crt
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/ssl/my.key
  SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/httpd/ssl/intermediate.crt
  ProxyPreserveHost On
  ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
  ProxyRequests Off
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{HTTP:UPGRADE} ^WebSocket$ [NC]
  RewriteCond %{HTTP:CONNECTION} Upgrade$ [NC]
  RewriteRule .* ws://localhost:6868%{REQUEST_URI} [P]
  ServerName my.dnsname.com
</VirtualHost>