Forwarding requests between contexts in Tomcat

Question

I\'d like to be able to do cross-context request forwarding in Tomcat with the Tuckey URLRewrite filter. For example, I\'d like to be able to route an incoming request with an

Answer 1

If your (real) webapp is deployed to /foo and you want to on-the-fly rewrite URLs like /group-elements/baz to forward (not redirect) to /foo/app/group/300245/elements, then you're going to have to deploy your rewrite filter to one of two places: /group-elements or /.

The above configuration appears to be deploying to ROOT (which is /) but then mapping the URL /baz to /foo/app/group/300245/elements. Instead, you probably want this:

<rule>
    <from>/group-elements/baz</from>
    <to context="foo">/foo/app/group/300245/elements</to>
</rule>

It looks like you were trying to hit http://example.com/baz which I would have expected to work. The last bit of magic is going to be making the ROOT context cross-context (note that your webapp does NOT need to be cross-context: only the urlrewrite one does). You can change the ROOT webapp to be cross-context by addint crossContext="true" to webapps/ROOT/META-INF/context.xml.

Finally, you should really stop putting <Context> elements in server.xml: leaving them in there basically means you need to restart Tomcat in order to change your webapp deployments.

Answer 2

After the comments I come do this possible conclusion:

I think you are mixing the concepts of a reverse proxy with cross-context. Cross-context is method to share data between two web-applications within the same application server. A reverse-proxy like 'Apache http' can rewrite a url to pass it to a certain server behind it, effectively hiding any unwanted parts or performing other operations like load-balancing.

The infrastructure would be: client --> reverse proxy --> application server