mortenege/websockets_using_apache_reverse_proxy.md

## websockets_using_apache_reverse_proxy.md

      
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              websockets_using_apache_reverse_proxy.md
            
          
    WebSockets using Apache Reverse Proxy

This post will cover how to configure our already running server [1, 2] to proxy websocket connections to a backend of our choice. We will continue using Vagrant to provision the guest machine.
Step 1

Clone or download a simple websocket server into our vagrantfolder (and extract if an archive).
Step 2

Modify 001-mysite.conf to include our websocket redirect.
<VirtualHost *:80>
 ProxyPass "/ws/" "ws://127.0.0.1:8000/"
 ProxyPassReverse "/ws/" "ws://127.0.0.1:8000/"
 ProxyPass "/" "http://127.0.0.1:8080/"
 ProxyPassReverse "/" "http://127.0.0.1:8080/"
</VirtualHost>

Step 3

Modify bootstrap.sh to 1) enable mod_proxy_wstunnel and 2) start a websocket server.
[...]
a2enmod proxy_wstunnel
[ before SimpleHTTPServer ]
cd /vagrant/www/html
[...]
cp /vagrant/simple-websocket-server-master/SimpleWebSocketServer/websocket.html /vagrant/www/html
python /vagrant/simple-websocket-server-master/SimpleWebSocketServer/SimpleExampleServer.py --example echo &> /dev/null &

When everything is configured reprovision the guest machine (vagrant up or vagrant reload --provision depending)
Step 4

Navigate to http://127.0.0.1:4567/websocket.html.
 As seen in the image above, connect the browser to
ws://127.0.0.1:4567/ws/

Click connect and send and review the output.
connected
sent: Hello World!
response: Hello World!

Conclusion

We have successfully configured our Apache server to function as a reverse proxy that allows us to route traffic to different backends depending on the relative path.