Topic: HTTPS problems running Tomcat behind Apache 2.2.4 AJP

[bill_bailey]

I have a Struts based application running in Tomcat 5.5.X which I have configured to be accessible through Apache HTTPD 2.2.4 with SSL. The Tomcat instance is also listening on 127.0.0.1:8888, but all access from the internet comes through Apache HTTPD.

I configured a virtual host in Tomcat, an AJP connector on Tomcat port 8009, and a virtual host in Apache HTTPD on port 80. I have the Apache virtual host set up to pass all requests to that host to Tomcat using AJP.

For example:

ProxyPass / ajp://ipaddress:8009/
ProxyPassReverse / ajp://ipaddress:8009/

Everything works fine with my configuration using HTTP which was fine for testing, but now that I'm going to production, I want to use HTTPS.

I set up SSL on Apache and it seems to be working. So I created a new SSL virtual host, replacing the one on port 80 with a new one on port 443 (note, Apache is still listening on port 80 as well, but it only serves local files; there is no virtual host configured for port 80). But when I go to the same URL replacing http: with https:, it doesn't work.

I've also tried using mod_proxy_http to forward the requests on 8888, but had only slightly better results that way. Some of the pages worked, but most did not.

In both cases, I notices some things that I found interesting. The URL in the Tomcat debug log files still displays as http://myvirtualhost/... even though the original request was https: ... this made me wonder if Tomcat not knowing this could cause issues with redirects and the like. I also saw entries a couple of times in the Apache access.log that suggested some of the failed pages were being handled by the default host on port 80 ... I was seeing things like E:\Apache2\htdocs\pages not found (where pages is part of my application's URL in tomcat).

Any ideas on what I might be missing? Any recommendations on how to set up Apache fronting Tomcat with SSL configured on Apache only?

[James Blond]

for SSL you need to load proxy_connect_module

LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so