How to setup Apache as reverse proxy to a docker containered Greenlight?

[gunwald]

Hey everybody!

I struggling to setup my Apache server as reverse proxy for a docker contained Greenlight instance.

In the official docs it is proposed to run Greenlight in a docker container with an Nginx instance as revers proxy (mainly to make it easy to run it alongside a BBB server). In my setup however I do not want to run my own BBB instance but rather use Greenlight as a frontend for an external BBB server.

But for convenience I set up Greenlight in a docker container nevertheless.

But as my server has many purposes (mainly it's used to deliver several websites and provide e-mail accounts both manged by Froxlor but it works also as an Matrix server) I do not want to setup Nginx as proxy, for that would force me to substantially change my actual running Froxlor manged Apache setup.

So I was trying to configure Apache instead as an revers proxy. Unfortunately in the docs is only a Nginx example: https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/greenlight/gl-install.html#2-install-greenlight

I tied to make this work on Apache with the following VirtualHost settings:

<VirtualHost MYIP:443>

ServerName greenlight.example.com

ProxyPreserveHost On

ProxyRequests Off

ProxyVia On

ProxyPass /cable http://127.0.0.1:5000 connectiontimeout=6h timeout=6h

ProxyPassReverse /cable http://127.0.0.1:5000

ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:5000/ ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:5000/

</VirtualHost>

I divert from the example in the docs that I do not want to use a virtual subfolder »b« but rather a subdomain to redirect specific traffic to the local port 5000. Unfortunately this isn't working. The server returns

502 Proxy error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request Reason: Error reading from remote server

Can somebody please explain to me what could be the reason for this error? How to translate the Nginx Header settings to Apache and the other timeout settings and are they even necessary?

[Jean Pluzo]

Hi gunwald,

it's not easy what you're trying to achieve, particularly because you're trying to use Apache. Even if there's a learning curve, I can only recommend that you change to nginx.

Your ProxyPass statements seem to be correct, but double check for any other variables you have to pass to the container (X-Forwarded-Proto, X-Forwarded-Ssl). These setting do seem to be necessary.

Start with using "/b" for test purposes. Once you get it working, change it to whatever you want. Do remember that you have to tell your container to also change from "/b" to something else (RELATIVE_URL_ROOT variable in the .env file).

If you've had any success after this, pleas update this post so that others can find a solution to a similar problem in the future.

Regards,

J.