Apache Webserver and Tomcat Virtual Hosts

published by Edmund Haselwanter on Monday, August 25, 2008
Problem description: You want to server multiple web applications with one Tomcat instance. The brute force variant is to just "rewrite" or ProxyPass the request from e.g. www.myhost.com to the local tomcat with localhost:8080/myhost. But this leads to context urls of ressources in the served html pages. You can either deploy you webapp in the ROOT context (but there is just ONE ROOT context, so this does not work). So let us use virtual hosts on both, the apache webserver and the tomcat servlet container.

create a app location in $CATALINA_HOME
mkdir www.your-server-name.net

deploy the webapp in ROOT context

edit server.xml according
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Guide+to+using+Apache+Tomcat%27s+Virtual+Hosts
http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/

in Tomcat server.xml

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="www.internal.your-server-name.net">
      <Host name="www.internal.your-server-name.net" appBase="www.your-server-name.net">
      </Host>
</Engine>

edit Apache config according:

In Apache conf
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Using+Apache+with+virtual+hosts+and+mod_proxy

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName www.your-server-name.net
       ProxyRequests Off
    <Proxy *>
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Proxy>
    ProxyPass / http://www.internal.your-server-name.net:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://www.internal.your-server-name.net:8080/
    <Location />
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>

and in /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1   localhost  www.internal.your-server-name.net

restart tomcat
restart apache

that's it :-)