Since there aren’t too many clear HOWTOs on this, it took a bit of fudging. Here is what you need to know.

Let’s create the host http://port8080.lubow.org/ to go to http://8080.lubow.org:8080/.

The first thing is a fairly common default configuration of NameVirtualHost option. This is so you can have multiple virtual hosts per IP. Unless you are crazy (or have a really good reason), you do not want to create an open proxy. So you need to globally configure the ProxyRequests variable to be off. Do the base setup for a VirtualHost of ServerName and ServerAdmin.

Setup the proxy authorizations (similar to the apache allow/denys). In order for the right HTTP headers to make it to the proxy’d virtual host, the headers will need to be rewritten. This needs to happen both going to the host and coming back from the host going to the client. This is why there is the ProxyPass and ProxyPassReverse. The first argument is the URL that on the virtual host that should match the URL (second argument) on the proxy’d virtual host. The ProxyPreserveHost option is generally not needed (but it is for the specific application I am running. Click the link above to read the description to determine whether it is right for you.

Putting it all together, you will get a file that looks like below. Make sure you replace your IPs and hostnames with what’s appropriate for your environment.

Related posts:

1. A Few Apache Tips