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In a previous post,
we discussed how it's possible to use Apache as a reverse proxy to
offload SSL and GZip compression from a Tomcat (or similar) J2EE
server. Originally, we had set this up on Windows, but we have since
moved it over to Ubuntu with no problems.
Another useful setup
is to use Apache to serve up your static resources (such as images,
javascript files, and CSS sheets), while only sending JSP or servlet
requests over to Tomcat. This can be useful because Apache is generally
much faster at serving up static content, not to mention that you
remove any extra overhead of proxying these requests. Even better, you
can continue to use Apache to handle SSL and compression.
This
tutorial assumes that you've been able to get Apache and Tomcat up and
running independently, and we'll walk through how to connect them.
First Attempt: Proxying All Traffic
Remember
from our previous post, you simply need to use the Location tag in your
Apache config file to proxy requests over to Tomcat. (For us, this
configuration file is located at /path/to/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default, but this could vary based on your setup.) <VirtualHost>
...
<Location />
ProxyPass http://appserver:8080/
ProxyPassReverse http://www.domain.com/
</Location>
...
</VirtualHost>
Real Attempt: Proxying JSP/Servlet Traffic
All
we need to do is slightly modify this configuration so that it will
only proxy JSP or servlet traffic, rather than all traffic:
<VirtualHost>
...
<Location /path/to/servlet>
ProxyPass http://appserver:8080/path/to/servlet
ProxyPassReverse http://www.domain.com/path/to/servlet
</Location>
...
</VirtualHost>
If
your JSP files aren't all in the same directory, you could also use the
LocationMatch tag to match files ending with .jsp. Keep in mind that
LocationMatch uses a regular expression, which might look something
like this:
<LocationMatch .+\.jsp$>
ProxyPass http://appserver:8080/
ProxyPassReverse http://www.domain.com/
</Location>
Conclusion
Assuming
the remainder of your Apache was already correctly setup, that should
be all there is to it. Apache will serve up most files itself, but will
use Tomcat where the Location or LocationMatch tags are matched.
A
special note: This tutorial was proxying to Tomcat using HTTP, but you
could also use the AJP connector. AJP is a binary protocol which should
reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred between Apache
and Tomcat. To do this, make sure that mod_proxy.so and
mod_proxy_ajp.so are loaded, then simply tweak the ProxyPass directive:
ProxyPass ajp://appserver:8080/
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