[production_web_proxying.xml]: proxying multiple instances with arbitary URLs including admin tools (dashboard, package manager) etc.

[jbiermann]

Describe the problem
The proxying document describes on how to setup a reverse proxy for individual exist applications. I really miss a note on how to proxy the dashboard in production_web_proxying.xml.
The simplest solution is to proxy all request from /exist to the exist db installation, e.g.
ProxyPass /exist/ http://localhost:8088/exist/
ProxyPassReverse /exist/ http://localhost:8088/exist/
You can't choose other URLs than /exist because the dashboard and all apps inside the dashboard make requests to /exist.

Note that you can setup any server related authentication for this path for security, this is left out in this ticket here, but a warning to secure this resource should be added.

On a single instance installation this works fine. But for my development servers I often run several exist instances on one machine and proxy them behind a HTTP server. I change the HTTP port from Jetty for each instance(from $EXIST_HOME/etc/jetty/jetty-http.xml).
Now here comes the problem for the dashboard related items. Since every admin tool makes requests to /exist I can only proxy one instance with the dashboard and admin tools.

Solution

Edit $EXIST_HOME/etc/jetty/webapps/exist-webapp-context.xml and change
<Set name="contextPath">/exist</Set>
to any context URL you want, for example here we set rc1:
<Set name="contextPath">/rc1</Set

Now you can do the reverse proxy for this example above:
ProxyPass /rc1/ http://localhost:8088/rc1/
ProxyPassReverse /rc1/ http://localhost:8088/rc1/

So you can have multiple exist instances running and access the dashboard on all of them.

There is still a small bug in the dasboard: if you click on the log in link and send the form, it will still send the request to /exist. The URL is hard coded.

Dashboard login URL fix
Open eXide and open the resource
/db/apps/dashboard/bower_components/existdb-launcher/existdb-login.html
Change the URL in the line
<iron-ajax id="checkLogin" url="/exist/apps/dashboard/login" ...>
to the context path you have choosen.
This looks similar to the Bug Dashboard Bug #73, but the solution posted there did not work for me.

It would be great if the documentation could be extended to include this information.

Please provide the following

• exist-db version: 5.2.0
• documentation version: 5.2.0

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[Humboldt-Repository]

@jbiermann Many thanks!! This must be included in the documentation....