Setting up a Proxy on the LiteSpeed Web ADC Context Level

• LiteSpeed Web ADC on a load balancer server
• Two web servers.

You have a very heavy site, and so you want to lighten the load by hosting the front-end and back-end on different servers.

• Front-end: https://test.example.com/
• Back-end: https://test.example.com/admin-panel/

The goal is:

• user requests https://test.example.com ---> LiteSpeed ADC ---> front-end server
• user requests https://test.example.com/admin-panel/ ---> LiteSpeed ADC ---> back-end server

Both ends should use same database server and network file system.

Make sure both servers are set up correctly. Use local host file to bypass DNS for testing purposes.

[root@test ~]# curl http://test.example.com
Hello World from front-end server
[root@test ~]# vi /etc/hosts
[root@test ~]# curl http://test.example.com/admin-panel/
Hello World from back-end server
[root@test ~]#

Create two clusters in ADC WebAdmin console.

In this example they are named front-end and back-end.

Add a worker for each cluster.

For Type, choose HTTP or HTTPS, and the corresponding port will be set to 80 or 443, respectively. You can override the port numbers, as long as your choice works with HTTP or HTTPS as needed.

Add the IP address to Node Address List.

After the two clusters are created, add a new virtual host. Only /admin-panel/ is going to be proxied to back-end, so the Default Cluster for this domain is front-end.

Create a context.

Set URI to /admin-panel/, making sure to include the / at the end. This ensures so every URI in that path will also be proxied.

Set Cluster to back-end.

Create a listener and add the test.example.com domain to it.

Save and restart the ADC, and check the results.

Visit test.example.com:

Visit test.example.com/admin-panel/:

in this example , we will proxy context URL https://test.example.com/litespeed/ to https://different.domain.com/litespeed2/

This step will be exact same as above

Create a new cluster if the `different.domain.com` is on different backend server, this step can be ignored if the targeted domain is on same cluster.

Create a new context

URI to /litespeed/

Cluster to back-end as above , or newly created cluster in step 2

Enable Rewrite to Yes

Rewrite Base to / , this setting is required , in order to prevent the rewrite rule messes up with base.

Rewrite Rules as follow:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !litespeed2 [NC]
RewriteRule "(.*)" "litespeed2/$1" [L,E=Proxy-Host:different.domain.com]

E=Proxy-Host flag is needed if backend is served on different domain.

This step can be omitted as listener is already mapped

Now visit https://test.example.com/litespeed/ , it will serve the content from https://different.domain.com/litespeed2/