Topic: Alias ability, only for URLs, not Files/Directories

[cbas]

I need to be able to route to the same resources using different Locations, and without opening a new port.

I've been looking through Apache documentation. The answer is not jumping out at me.

[mraddi]

Maybe mod_rewrite could help you?

It might be easier for others to give some hints if you provide examples.

[cbas]

I'm not sure what examples to give.

A little history...
We have a legacy app that we have a new requirement to bolt SAML SSO onto.

First of all, I know the "easy" way is to use a separate port. For us, the hard part is convincing our (government) client that it is necessary to open another port for us on each of their servers.

We do use RewriteCond/RewriteRule already to prevent proxy of certain URLs.

The trouble is, we literally are accessing the same URLs 2 different ways.
1) normal web-app use
2) publishing management use

There is an ancient publishing app called Zope we use. The Zope Manage Interface normally adds a suffix to the URL, so no problem - fixable with a regex. The problem comes in with the "Action" buttons in the ZMI. The form these buttons trigger POST the unaltered URL, and now instead add a payload.
The POSTing of this unaltered URL is the problem. The regex mentioned above cannot match it and as far as I can see, there is no Apache directive to match against a POST payload.
SAML sees the unaltered URL and redirects to its challenge page.

We cannot use REMOTE_HOST as a gate because access is from within the client's network.

[tangent]

For your ZMI "Action" buttons, could you use a rewrite condition to pick up the unaltered URL along with another condition to check for a POST method, and then modify the request with your required suffix?

[James Blond]

Another idea might be to run the legacy app on a different port and use a reverse proxy setting to hide the other port.

[mraddi]

If you proxy a directory to another server absolute paths in the response are not modified. According to documentation only paths in HTTP-response (i.e. 301- or 302-responses) are modified if you requested to do so with ProxyPassReverse (if I got the documentation correct).

I've put my old Raspberry Pi into the notebook-webserver's /pi/-directory and resolved the problem with the absolute paths using mod_substitue as in the following example:

[cbas]

[James Blond]

Mr Addi only forgot to add the port in the example. You can have that of cause, too.