mod_proxy_http

Apache Module mod_proxy_http

Summary

This module requires the service of mod_proxy. It provides the features used for proxying HTTP and HTTPS requests. mod_proxy_http supports HTTP/0.9, HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1. It does not provide any caching abilities. If you want to set up a caching proxy, you might want to use the additional service of the mod_cache module.

Thus, in order to get the ability of handling HTTP proxy requests, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http have to be present in the server.

Environment Variables

In addition to the configuration directives that control the behaviour of mod_proxy, there are a number of environment variables that control the HTTP protocol provider. Environment variables below that don't specify specific values are enabled when set to any value.

proxy-sendextracrlf

Causes proxy to send an extra CR-LF newline on the end of a request. This is a workaround for a bug in some browsers.

force-proxy-request-1.0

Forces the proxy to send requests to the backend as HTTP/1.0 and disables HTTP/1.1 features.

proxy-nokeepalive

Forces the proxy to close the backend connection after each request.

proxy-chain-auth

If the proxy requires authentication, it will read and consume the proxy authentication credentials sent by the client. With proxy-chain-auth it will also forward the credentials to the next proxy in the chain. This may be necessary if you have a chain of proxies that share authentication information. Security Warning: Do not set this unless you know you need it, as it forwards sensitive information!

proxy-sendcl

HTTP/1.0 required all HTTP requests that include a body (e.g. POST requests) to include a Content-Length header. This environment variable forces the Apache proxy to send this header to the backend server, regardless of what the Client sent to the proxy. It ensures compatibility when proxying for an HTTP/1.0 or unknown backend. However, it may require the entire request to be buffered by the proxy, so it becomes very inefficient for large requests.

proxy-sendchunks or proxy-sendchunked

This is the opposite of proxy-sendcl. It allows request bodies to be sent to the backend using chunked transfer encoding. This allows the request to be efficiently streamed, but requires that the backend server supports HTTP/1.1.

proxy-interim-response

This variable takes values RFC (the default) or Suppress. Earlier httpd versions would suppress HTTP interim (1xx) responses sent from the backend. This is technically a violation of the HTTP protocol. In practice, if a backend sends an interim response, it may itself be extending the protocol in a manner we know nothing about, or just broken. So this is now configurable: set proxy-interim-response RFC to be fully protocol compliant, or proxy-interim-response Suppress to suppress interim responses.

proxy-initial-not-pooled

If this variable is set, no pooled connection will be reused if the client request is the initial request on the frontend connection. This avoids the "proxy: error reading status line from remote server" error message caused by the race condition that the backend server closed the pooled connection after the connection check by the proxy and before data sent by the proxy reached the backend. It has to be kept in mind that setting this variable downgrades performance, especially with HTTP/1.0 clients.

Request notes

mod_proxy_http creates the following request notes for logging using the %{VARNAME}n format in LogFormat or ErrorLogFormat:

proxy-source-port

The local port used for the connection to the backend server.

proxy-status

The HTTP status received from the backend server.