Using mod_rewrite for Proxying

This document supplements the mod_rewritereference documentation. It describes how to use the RewriteRule's [P] flag to proxy content to another server. A number of recipes are provided that describe common scenarios.

modrewrite provides the [P] flag, which allows URLs to be passed, via modproxy, to another server. Two examples are given here. In one example, a URL is passed directly to another server, and served as though it were a local URL. In the other example, we proxy missing content to a back-end server.

To simply map a URL to another server, we use the [P] flag, as follows:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /products/ RewriteRule ^widget/(.*)$ http://product.example.com/widget/$1 [P] ProxyPassReverse /products/widget/ http://product.example.com/widget/

In the second example, we proxy the request only if we can't find the resource locally. This can be very useful when you're migrating from one server to another, and you're not sure if all the content has been migrated yet.

RewriteCond %{REQUESTFILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUESTFILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://old.example.com/$1 [P] ProxyPassReverse / http://old.example.com/

In each case, we add a

directive to ensure that any redirects issued by the backend are correctly passed on to the client.ProxyPassReverse

whenever possible in preference to mod_rewrite.ProxyPassMatch

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