Avoid 302 Redirects through Apache

Question

Hello I have a confluence installation running on tomcat. In front of tomcat I have an apache server.

When I go to my page a 302 to /homepage.action is done and afterwards a redirect to the start space set in confluence and then a third redirect to actual start page of this page.

This is annoying and I don't know how the google bot is affected by it.

Thus I have two questions:

1. How is the google bot affected by all this redirects?
2. How can I avoid these redirects with apache?

I tried to make a proxy directive directly to my landing page.

<LocationMatch ^/$>
    ProxyPass ajp://myurl:8009/mysite
    ....
</LocationMatch>
<LocationMatch /*>
    ProxyPass ajp://myurl:8009/
    ....
</LocationMatch>

But this does not work. Either I get a 404 or I get to every request the same response.

Currently I got this configuration working:

<LocationMatch />
    ProxyPass ajp://myurl:8009/
    ....
</LocationMatch>

But this leads to a not so cool URL at the starting page.

Kind regards

Christian

Answer 1

Atlassian has documented this use case.

UPDATE 4/20/2011

Well, I tried mod_proxy with Confluence and, like you, didn't like the results. I found using mod_jk to be simpler and cleaner (which I think is your objective here with the friendly URLs).

Again, Atlassian has documented how to use mod_jk. Here are my configs:

[confluence-install]/conf/server.xml

<Connector port="8016"
              enableLookups="false" protocol="AJP/1.3" minSpareThreads="5" maxThreads="256" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />

[/etc/apache2/workers.properties]

worker.list=confluence
worker.confluence.host=localhost
worker.confluence.port=8016
worker.confluence.type=ajp13

[/etc/apache2/httpd.conf]

NameVirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80
<VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80>
        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
        ServerName confluence.domain.com

        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, alert, emerg.
        LogLevel warn

        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/confluence-error.log
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/confluence-access.log combined

        JkMount / confluence
        JkMount /* confluence

        JkLogLevel warn
        JkLogFile /var/log/apache2/confluence_jk.log

</VirtualHost>

Hopefully, switching to mod_jk is an option for you. I hope this helps resolve your question.