Apache proxypass trailing slash / directory issue

Question

I have a legacy site for a charity running on an old Apache 1.3 instance, behind Apache 2 running proxypass. When a request comes to example.com, Apache 2 sends it internally to localhost:8080 which works fine.

The problem:

example.com/blog/ works but example.com/blog (no trailing slash) does not. The URL it changes to in Chrome is example.com:8080/blog/ which doesn't exist.

The same is true for all other directories.

Apache 2:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/
</VirtualHost>

Apache 1:

NameVirtualHost *:8080
<VirtualHost *:8080>
    DocumentRoot /usr/www/html/
    ServerName example.com
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^(GET|POST|HEAD)$
    RewriteRule .* - [F]
</VirtualHost>

I thought a simple solution would be to add a rewriterule in either virtualhost but I've not had any success despite many attempts. I think a key issue is it's wrongly looking on example.com:8080 when the slash isn't there. It would be great if anyone can help me out, ask me any additional info that would be useful.

Answer 1

I see no ProxyPassReverse or mod_proxy_html directives in your config; the lack of ProxyPassReverse, specifically, is likely to be the cause of your issue as the backend Apache is sending a redirect to the slashful URL, but has it's internal name in the Location: header, and without ProxyPassReverse the frontend Apache is just letting that internal URL leak.

mod_proxy_html is for the equivalent issues, but in HTML rather than HTTP headers. It's also worth using, unless you're really sure nobody's going to go putting a full URL in the HTML (which, for any dynamic webapp, is a bad bet).