Apache Proxy & Making Things Look Nice

I recently setup a dev/build server with Jira, Confluence, Hudson, ATG (with two web apps and the atg admin), Oracle (with web admin), and Postgres (with web admin). I’m running everything independantly, and everything is listening on it’s own high number port. This makes the URLs ugly, and finding what you want tricky.

I used Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy_http to wrap all of the services in the Apache running on port 80.

Any Apache 2.2 installation should come with mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http. You may need to activate them with something like this:

LoadModule proxy_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_proxy_http.so


then set a basic configuration for security:

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On


Order deny,allow
Allow from all



It’s best to ensure all the applications you are trying to wrap are listening at context roots, not the base URL/port. So you want hudson on :9000/hudson/ or whatever your setup has (for instance: java -jar hudson.war –httpPost=9000 –prefix=/hudson ). Same for Jira and everything else.

Then setup your proxy mappings in your apache configs.


ProxyPass /jira http://localhost:8080/jira
ProxyPassReverse /jira http://localhost:8080/jira

Order allow,deny
Allow from all



Repeat for all of your applications. Then just restart apache to pickup all the changes:


apachectl restart


So now we have Jira at host/jira, Confluence at host/confluence, Hudson at host/hudson, and so on. Pretty, easy to book mark, easy to cross link. It just looks more professional.