Reverse Proxy in CakePHP?

Question

I've got a CakePHP application, and the following directives in my httpd.conf

ProxyRequests off
ProxyPass /forum/ http://somesite.com/phpbb3
ProxyPass /gallery/ http://someothersite.com/gallery3
<Location /forum/>
        ProxyPassReverse /
</Location>
<Location /gallery/>
        ProxyPassReverse /
</Location>

Without CakePHP this works fine - but because CakePHP is using it's own redirection logic from routes.php and other sources, it seems to override any proxy settings, so any call to "/community" on my server follows the default pathway of looking for a Controller called CommunityController.

My issue here is that I want to have one server that serves muliple applications, but keep it seamless to the user - so a complete PHPBB application can for instance run within the "/forum" directory as if it were a controller in CakePHP.

Has anyone done this before, and can it be done? Why does mod_rewrite and/or the routes.php file override my mod_proxy directives??

Answer 1

Perhaps instead of using mod_proxy, you could use mod_rewrite to create a RewriteRule directive with the [P] (proxy) flag in conjunction with the [L] (last rule) flag.

'proxy|P' (force proxy):

This flag forces the substitution part to be internally sent as a proxy request and immediately (rewrite processing stops here) put through the proxy module. You must make sure that the substitution string is a valid URI (typically starting with http://hostname) which can be handled by the Apache proxy module. If not, you will get an error from the proxy module. Use this flag to achieve a more powerful implementation of the ProxyPass directive, to map remote content into the namespace of the local server.

Note: mod_proxy must be enabled in order to use this flag.

'last|L' (last rule):

Stop the rewriting process here and don't apply any more rewrite rules. This corresponds to the Perl last command or the break command in C. Use this flag to prevent the currently rewritten URL from being rewritten further by following rules. For example, use it to rewrite the root-path URL ('/') to a real one, e.g., '/e/www/'.