Nathan CrauseMusings of a Software Developer

After stumbling around with lousy documentation and zero examples, I finally found at least one site which hinted at how to do this, and led me to this solution.

Your virtual host file should look something like this:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName j.digitalcove.ca
  DocumentRoot /usr/local/tomcat

  ProxyRequests On
  ProxyPreserveHost On

  <Location />
    ProxyPass http://127.0.0.1:8081/
    ProxyPassReverse http://127.0.0.1:8081/
  </Location>

  <Proxy http://127.0.0.1:8081/>
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from All
  </Proxy>
</VirtualHost>

A few things to note here - we need to enclose the Proxy instructions in a <Location> marker, and we have to include a <Proxy> section. None of the documentation (either Apache webserver's or Tomcat's) mentions this. Without the <Proxy> section, you will always get an HTTP 403 "Forbidden" error message.

Unlike the site mentioned previously, I also opted for adding a new connection at port 8081 so that I can use the proper Tomcat attributes "proxyName" and "proxyPort", as can be seen in this connector definition (which I placed directly in my <Service> section:

<Connector port="8081" protocol="HTTP/1.1" proxyName="j.digitalcove.ca" proxyPort="80"/>

Enjoy!