Spring Boot with embedded Tomcat behind Apache proxy

Your proxy looks fine, and so does the backend app, up to a point, but it doesn't seem to be seeing the RemoteIpValve modified request. The default behaviour of the RemoteIpValve includes a pattern match for the proxy IP address (as a security check) and it only modifies requests that it thinks are from a valid proxy. The pattern defaults in Spring Boot to a well-known set of internal IP addresses like 10.*.*.* and 192.168.*.*, so if your proxy isn't on one of those you need to explicitly configure it, e.g.

server.tomcat.internal-proxies=172\\.17\\.\\d{1,3}\\.\\d{1,3}|127\\.\\d{1,3}\\.\\d{1,3}\\.\\d{1,3}

(using properties file format, which means you have to double escape the backslashes).

You can see the what is happening in the RemoteIpValve if you set

logging.level.org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteIpValve=DEBUG

or set a breakpoint in it.

A typical solution to this problem is to let the proxy handle any required rewrite. For example, in Apache you can use the rewrite_module and/or headers_module to correct headers. As another example, Nginx handles this and other similar cases automatically for you after configuring upstream servers.

In response to comments:

What are the remote_ip_header and protocol_header spring boot configuration values?

Let's forget Spring Boot for a moment. Tomcat, the embedded servlet container, features a valve known as the RemoteIpValve. This valve is a port of the Apache remotip_module. The primary purpose of this valve is to treat the "useragent which initiated the request as the originating useragent" for "the purposes of authorization and logging". In order for this valve to be used it needs to be configured.

Please find more information about this valve here.

Spring Boot conveniently supports configuring this valve via application.properties through the server.tomcat.remote_ip_header and server.tomcat.protocol_header properties.

I had the same problem the other day. After some debugging of Spring Boot 1.3 I found the following solution.

1. You have to setup the headers on your Apache proxy:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName www.myapp.org
    ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:8080/
    RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto https
    RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Port 443
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ... (SSL directives omitted for readability)
</VirtualHost>

2. You have to tell your Spring Boot app to use these headers. So put the following line in your application.properties (or any other place where Spring Boots understands properties):

server.use-forward-headers=true

If you do these two things correctly, every redirect your application sends will not go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/[path] but automatically to https://www.myapp.com/[path]

Update 1. The documentation about this topic is here. You should read it at least to be aware of the property server.tomcat.internal-proxies which defines the range of IP-addresses for proxy servers that can be trusted.

Update 2021 The documentation is moved to here. The Spring Boot configuration is a litte different now.