Plone and Apache 2.2

Weirdness with Plone and Apache 2.2

While migrating one Plone 3 site to another server I got some unexpected configuration issues.

I have just migrated the python.org.mx site to another server. It has a Plone 3.3.5 site with PloneHelpCenter and a Planet aggregator for blogs. There's a Varnish instance in the middle. Moving this site was very straightforward except for an unexpected Apache configuration directive for mod_proxy.

Normally we used these mod_rewrite directives to make the magic happen:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/$ http://127.0.0.1:8080/VirtualHostBase/http/%{HTTP_HOST}:80/PythonMexico/VirtualHostRoot/$1 [L,P]

RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://127.0.0.1:8080/VirtualHostBase/http/%{HTTP_HOST}:80/PythonMexico/VirtualHostRoot/$1 [L,P]

But that wasn't enough for Apache 2.2 and the proxy redirection was not being made, resulting in an error like this:

[Mon Oct 11 23:24:08 2010] [error] [client 220.181.94.228] client denied by server configuration: proxy:http://127.0.0.1:8080/VirtualHostBase/http/www.pythonmexico.org:80/PythonMexico/VirtualHostRoot/

After some testing I realized that I had to explicitly allow the reverse proxy to Varnish:

<IfModule mod_proxy.c>
  <Proxy proxy:http://127.0.0.1:8080/>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from localhost
  </Proxy>
</IfModule>

So, that's it.