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Say I have a registered URL mywebsite.com pointing to my server with a public IP address.

I want to run both tomcat and apache to serve pages (i.e., some static pages on apache and some dynamic pages on tomcat, like jsp etc...).

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that apache is listening on 80 and tomcat on 8080.

I heard about mod_proxy. Is it possible to have requests to mywebsite.com go to apache and mywebsite/loggedin go to tomcat? If yes, how should this be configured and where? Thanks.

Jérôme Verstrynge
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2 Answers2

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I would recommend using mod_jk--it tends to be more specific than mod_proxy, and easier to debug. You can forward contexts. I.e., if I have webapp1 and webapp2 running on Tomcat, and I have an images directory on Apache, this would work:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ...
    JKMount /webapp1/* ajp13
    JKMount /webapp2/* ajp13
    Alias /images "/some/local/dir"
</VirtualHost>

This is also much easier to configure, and most distributions already have packages in their native package managers. Hope this helps!

Andrew M.
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mod_proxy works well with tomcat. There are 2 ways to proxy to tomcat via mod_proxy.

  1. http - So tomcat runs as an http server to and apache talks to tomcat via HTTP
  2. mod_proxy_ajp - This uses the ajp protocol (also used by mod_jk). In this case apache talks to tomcat via a binary protocol which has some better performance.

mod_proxy_ajp is a package which comes with apache as compared to mod_jk which needs to be downloaded and compiled. But mod_jk usually gets new features first and has more options. If your setup is NOT complex ... mod_proxy_ajp is the way to go. In which case in Tomcat, you need to configure tomcat to have a AJP connector. And you will not need an http connector in server.xml. For apache the directive may be as easy as this:

  ProxyPass /loggedin  ajp://127.0.0.2:8009/loggedin

Proxy docs with ajp examples are here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy.html

Tim Funk
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  • Thanks, I am currently doing a lot of reading following the answers so far. I surely need a simple solution right now, but I know I'll need something more sophisticated in the future. Climbing the learning curve. – Jérôme Verstrynge Sep 20 '11 at 11:16