This post shows students and new users steps to setup a reverse proxy with Apache HTTP server. Apache is is mostly used as web server and not reverse proxy. However, Apache comes with wide range of powerful extensions to enable reverse proxy and other features. A reverse proxy is a service sits between the client and backend servers.
The proxy server takes and directs client requests to the appropriate backend servers. A proxy server can also perform additional tasks such as SSL encryption, caching, compression and load balancing to take the load off the backend servers.
A reverse proxy server is typically used in front of Node.js, Python, Java and other popular applications that do not have web server features enabled. In this case, Apache is usually the proxy server used to handle requests for clients.
Below we’ll show you how to use Apache as a reverse proxy for most applications and backend servers. We’ll give you some basic settings that may be used in your environments.
Also, for students and new users learning Linux, the easiest place to start learning is on Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is the modern, open source Linux operating system for desktop, servers and other devices.
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