Apache 2 reverse proxy to ssl local networked lamp app server - 95% working, except first page login redirection

Question

Dived into the joys of using apache as a proxy. Awesome. There is a learning curve to deal with but the payoff is well worth it!

I took the virtual host approach to benefit from having the same urls whether I access locally or externally. Everything is setup, apache mod_proxy is listening on port 443, redirecting all gitlab.mydomain traffic to lan based lamp stack and all is swell except when I hit the front page, after being redirected http://gitlab.mydomain/users/sign_in. I have to retype the https in the url manually and then all is well. Ditto when I post a comment on the projects page. For the login problem the application (gitlab) seems to redirect anonymous non-logged in users to http://gitlab.mydomain.com instead of the expected https://gitlab.mydomain.com.

I probably will have to dive into code tomorrow and see if it is at application level ie maybe a $base_url variable of some sort like in Drupal. Here is the vhost file, maybe I missed or broke something in there, any tips welcome.

############################################################
#
#  proxy related directives
#
###########################################################
#NameVirtualHost gitlab.mydomain.com:443
<VirtualHost *:443>
  ServerName gitlab.mydomain.com
  ProxyRequests off
  LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\"" combined
  CustomLog logs/gitlab_log combined
  LogLevel info

  SSLProxyEngine On
  <Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
  </Proxy>
  SSLEngine on
  SSLProtocol all
  SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/localhost.crt
  SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/localhost.key

 # SSLProtocol all -SSLv2
 # SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT:!SSLv2:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW

  ProxyPass / https://gitlab.mydomain.com/
  ProxyPassReverse / https://gitlab.mydomain.com/
</VirtualHost>

• Just saw that NameVirtualHost is commented?!? is this not needed? Whatever, things are 95% working but the signup page is kind of annoying.

• Can someone with enough rep to edit tags please add gitlab tag to post?

Answer 1

The isssue turned out to be resolved application side. In gitlab configuration files one needs to indicate protocol is https.