I'm looking to setup a simple WebSocket connection through Apache.
I'm running two web servers one being Apache and the other a simple PHP WebSocket server to handle socket connections, this is running on a Ubuntu box hosted on RackSpace.
I've done a lot of research already and still haven't found a good example that shows basic configuration to setup a WebSocket server in any language (in this case PHP) on a remote host, every example I've seen has been using 'localhost' which in my opinion is quite useless.
So Apache's root is /var/www/html (default) and is listening on port 8080, so for example purpose (www.mydomain.com:8080) below is the source code for the index.html page.
<html>
<head>
<script>
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", init);
function init(){
var socket = new WebSocket("ws://www.mydomain.com:8080/sockets");
setInterval(timer.sockstate, 3000, socket);
socket.addEventListener('open', sock.open);
socket.addEventListener('message', sock.msg);
socket.addEventListener('error', sock.err);
socket.addEventListener('close', sock.close);
}
var timer = {
"sockstate": function(o){
switch(o.readyState){
case 0:
console.log('CONNECTING...');
break;
case 1:
console.log('OPEN...');
break;
case 2:
console.log('CLOSING...');
break;
case 3:
console.log('CLOSED...');
break;
}
}
};
var sock = {
"open": function(e){
console.log(e);
},
"msg": function(e){
console.log(e);
},
"err": function(e){
console.log(e);
},
"close": function(e){
console.log(e);
}
};
</script>
</head>
<body></body>
</html>
Now the PHP server is listening to 127.0.0.1 on port 9000 here is the source code for it, and it's starts up fine via cmd line php -q /var/www/html/sockets/server.php
Finally my configuration file in Apache
<VirtualHost *:8080>
ServerName www.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ProxyPass "/sockets/" "http://127.0.0.1:9000/"
ProxyPassReverse "/sockets/" "http://127.0.0.1:9000/"
</VirtualHost>
I'm positive it's not a networking problem I ufw status to assure that both ports (8080/9000) are allowed, and made sure mod_proxy and mod_proxy_wstunnel are being loaded.
Question: So what am I doing wrong here in my Apache Config?
I've just finished this setup on my own server, so I hope this helps someone. My config is very similar to yours. This is what I would change
Javascript
//Notice the path ends with a trailing hash. Don't know whether it matters
var socket = new WebSocket('ws://www.domain.com:8080/socket/');
VirtualHost
# Protocol should be 'ws', not 'http', for mod_proxy_wstunnel to work
ProxyPass "/sockets/" "ws://127.0.0.1:9000/"
ProxyPassReverse "/sockets/" "ws://127.0.0.1:9000/"
Because Apache forwards WS traffic, the websocket server does not need to be exposed to the public. You can keep port 9000 closed to the internet.
I also have mod_proxy_http enabled, but I don't know whether it's required.
If redirection is not happening, look at your Apache error log. You've already mentioned a couple of these things but make sure:
mod_proxy and mod_proxy_wstunnel are loadedProxyPass is in the correct VirtualHost