Reverse proxy on development machine to get rid of ports in URLs

As a web developer I deal with several HTTP servers: Apache, Tomcat6, Tomcat7, Play!, WEBrick. In order to run all of them on the same machine (possibly at the same time) each needs to be bound on a port different than well known 80, so that you need to specify the port as part of the URL (for example in the browser). This is cumbersome and ugly: my purpose is to reach the servers as if they were on different machines, like this:

• a.host.example.com (Tomcat6, localhost:8080)

• b.host.example.com (WEBrick, localhost:8181)

• c.host.example.com (Nginx, localhost:8282)

• d.host.example.com (CouchDB, localhost:8383)

• …

HUGOMORE42

First step is to allow client machines to resolve hostnames (ie translate hostnames to IP addresses). This is accomplished by adding records to /etc/hosts or by adding CNAME records to the DNS server.

Enabling mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http is done this way

$sudo a2enmod proxy
$sudo a2enmod proxy_http

Now, let’s configure Apache to act as a Reverse Proxy. The following ensures that Apache runs virtual hosts

# /etc/apache2/ports.conf
NameVirtualHost *:80
Listen 80

Finally, let’s create a site for each virtual host. For example, to link play.my.example.com to localhost:9000, put the following in a new /etc/apache2/sites-available/play

<VirtualHost *:80>
   ServerName play.aldebaran.zybnet.com
   <Proxy *>
      Order deny,allow
      Allow from all
   </Proxy>
   ProxyPreserveHost On
   ProxyPass / http://localhost:9000/
   ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:9000/
</VirtualHost>

And enable it with

$sudo a2ensite play