How to make Tomcat 8.5 RewriteValve work with AJP1.3 JKMount?

Question

Premise

On an Ubuntu 16.04 server with the latest Apache2 installed, I've different Virtual Hosts,
each one properly configured (and secured with Let's Encrypt):

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/my.site.com-le-ssl.conf

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/my.other.site.com-le-ssl.conf

pointing to static content under:

/var/www/my.site.com/

/var/www/my.other.site.com/

This works fine:
by calling https://my.site.com/ I see the static site that is contained in /var/www/my.site.com/.

I've then installed Tomcat 8.5.9 and secured it with a reverse proxy, hence adding:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    . . .
    JKMount /* ajp13_worker
    . . .
</VirtualHost>

to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/my.site.com-le-ssl.conf .

This also works fine:
by calling https://my.site.com/ now I see the Tomcat home.

Desired Goal

I want to achieve the following result:

by calling https://my.site.com/ I want to see the static site (/var/www/my.site.com/);
by calling https://my.site.com/dynamic I want to see the Tomcat home;
hence, by calling https://my.site.com/dynamic/myApp I expect to run myApp.war published under tomcat/webapps;

Attempted solution

My idea was the following:

make Apache JKMount-ing only the requests with the /dynamic context, hence instead of:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    . . .
    JKMount /* ajp13_worker
    . . .
</VirtualHost>

, I've used:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    . . .
    JKMount /dynamic/* ajp13_worker
    . . .
</VirtualHost>

and this appears to works, on the Apache side; calling my.site.com will open the static content, while calling the my.site.com/dynamic will give Tomcat 404.

Now I need to rewrite the URL to remove the dynamic context, in order to make it transparent to Tomcat, and I've tried for the last 3 hours to do that with the Tomcat RewriteValve:

I've edited tomcat/conf/server.xml by adding the Valve:

<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
    . . .
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.rewrite.RewriteValve" />
</Host>

I've created a tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/rewrite.config file, containing the right rule (tested here):
```
RewriteRule ^dynamic/(.+)$ /$1
```

For some reason, this does not work. The Tomcat's RewriteValve rule is either ignored, or malfunctioning, or there's something wrong in the way I thinked the whole thing... I'm not a sysadmin, so I'd not be surprised by some naive error here.

Do you see where the problem is ? Or another way to make this work ?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 04 '17 at 15:46

I've solved it by using mod_proxy_ajp instead of mod_jk.

Apache's my.site.com-le-ssl.conf

<VirtualHost *:443>
    . . .
    ProxyPass        /dynamic/ ajp://localhost:8009/
    ProxyPassReverse /dynamic/ ajp://localhost:8009/
    . . .
</VirtualHost>

Tomcat's rewrite.config

RewriteRule ^dynamic(.+)$ dynamic/$1/ [R]

Now it works as desired.

How to make Tomcat 8.5 RewriteValve work with AJP1.3 JKMount?

Premise

Desired Goal

Attempted solution

1 Answers1