Sometimes you may find the need to shutdown a site for any reason an a specific server, basically the server that is listening to the web, so of course you will always want to keep that site(s) up and running while you perform whatever is needed on it, let's call it, 'external server', on a different environment, 'internal server'.
To do so you need to use an apache module called mod_proxy which enables a web server act as a router of traffic to another server, a tunnel.
- Enable mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http mod_proxy_html on external server
- create a virtual host on internal server pointing to internal server, ex:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName proxy.example.net
ProxyRequests Off
<Proxy *>
Order deny,allow
Allow from all
</Proxy>
ProxyPass / http://proxy.example.net/
ProxyPassReverse / http://proxy.example.net/
ProxyHTMLURLMap http://proxy.example.net /app1
<Location />
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
ProxyPassReverse /
#http://apache.webthing.com/mod_proxy_html/config.html
#On the above link version 3.0.1 of libapache2-mod-proxy-html
#does not use ProxyHTMLEnable instead uses ProxyHTMLInterp On|Off
#so this problem is coming.
#Ubuntu 10.04 by default uses
#libapache2-mod-proxy-html of version 3.0.1
#Changed the ProxyHTMLEnable to
#ProxyHTMLInterp
ProxyHTMLInterp On
ProxyHTMLURLMap / /app1/
RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
</Location>
</VirtualHost>
modify hosts file on you internal server and add the proper entry:
XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX proxy.example.net
and finally on internal server you will have a normal virtual host for local.external.server.com
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /var/www/proxy/www
ServerName proxy.example.net
<Directory /var/www/proxy/www>
Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
