Reverse Proxy in CakePHP? - apache

Question

I've got a CakePHP application, and the following directives in my httpd.conf
ProxyRequests off
ProxyPass /forum/ http://somesite.com/phpbb3
ProxyPass /gallery/ http://someothersite.com/gallery3
<Location /forum/>
ProxyPassReverse /
</Location>
<Location /gallery/>
ProxyPassReverse /
</Location>
Without CakePHP this works fine - but because CakePHP is using it's own redirection logic from routes.php and other sources, it seems to override any proxy settings, so any call to "/community" on my server follows the default pathway of looking for a Controller called CommunityController.
My issue here is that I want to have one server that serves muliple applications, but keep it seamless to the user - so a complete PHPBB application can for instance run within the "/forum" directory as if it were a controller in CakePHP.
Has anyone done this before, and can it be done? Why does mod_rewrite and/or the routes.php file override my mod_proxy directives??

Answer 1

Perhaps instead of using mod_proxy, you could use mod_rewrite to create a RewriteRule directive with the [P] (proxy) flag in conjunction with the [L] (last rule) flag.
'proxy|P' (force proxy):
This flag
forces the substitution part to be
internally sent as a proxy request and
immediately (rewrite processing stops
here) put through the proxy module.
You must make sure that the
substitution string is a valid URI
(typically starting with
http://hostname) which can be handled
by the Apache proxy module. If not,
you will get an error from the proxy
module. Use this flag to achieve a
more powerful implementation of the
ProxyPass directive, to map remote
content into the namespace of the
local server.
Note: mod_proxy must be enabled in
order to use this flag.
'last|L' (last rule):
Stop the
rewriting process here and don't apply
any more rewrite rules. This
corresponds to the Perl last command
or the break command in C. Use this
flag to prevent the currently
rewritten URL from being rewritten
further by following rules. For
example, use it to rewrite the
root-path URL ('/') to a real one,
e.g., '/e/www/'.