Run IDOL Admin With a Reverse Proxy

You can use IDOL Admin with a reverse proxy. Using a reverse proxy can allow you to:

  • add security and protect the identity of your backend services.

  • provide SSL termination.

  • improve performance by adding compression or caching.

For IDOL Admin to work through a reverse proxy, you must provide information to allow the IDOL Admin interface to connect to the underlying IDOL component. You provide this information by configuring your reverse proxy to set response headers for the path that you use to access IDOL Admin.

The following table lists the response headers that you must set.

Header name Value description
AciPortPath The path that you use to access the IDOL component ACI port.
IndexPortPath The path that you use to access the IDOL component index port. This value is required only if the IDOL component has an index port (for example, the Content component, or DIH).
ServicePortPath The path that you use to access the IDOL component service port.

When you have set these values, the reverse proxy sends the response headers to IDOL Admin when you access it, and IDOL Admin reads the appropriate values so that it can adapt the links that it uses to send actions, index actions, and service actions to the IDOL component.

The following sections provide examples of how to set these response headers for different web services.

Apache 2

Apache 2 is a free open source Web server that you can configure as a reverse proxy by using the mod_proxy module.

The following example shows how to set the response headers for IDOL Admin in your Apache 2 configuration.

<Location /content/>
    ProxyPassReverse /
    ProxyPass http://idol-content.example.com:9100/
    Header set AciPortPath /content/
    Header set IndexPortPath /content/index/
    Header set ServicePortPath /content/service/
</Location>

<Location /content/index/>
    ProxyPassReverse /
    ProxyPass http://idol-content.example.com:9101/
</Location>

<Location /content/service/>
    ProxyPassReverse /
    ProxyPass http://idol-content.example.com:9102/
</Location>

In this example, you access IDOL Admin by using the /content/ path, which points to the IDOL Content component ACI port (9100 in this case). The reverse proxy sets the response headers for this path, and IDOL Admin can use them to access the index port (/content/index/) and the service port (/content/service/).

NOTE: You must set these response headers for every IDOL Admin that you run for different IDOL components.

NGINX

NGINX is a free open source Web server and reverse proxy.

The following example shows how to set the response headers for IDOL Admin in your NGINX configuration:

location /content/ {
    proxy_pass http://idol-content.example.com:9100;
    proxy_set_header    AciPortPath      /content/;
    proxy_set_header    IndexPortPath    /content/index/;
    proxy_set_header    ServicePortPath  /content/service/;
}
location /content/index/ {
    proxy_pass http://idol-content.example.com:9101;
}
location /content/service/ {
    proxy_pass http://idol-content.example.com:9102;
}

In this example, you access IDOL Admin by using the /content/ path, which points to the IDOL Content component ACI port (9100 in this case). The reverse proxy sets the response headers for this path, and IDOL Admin can use them to access the index port (/content/index/) and the service port (/content/service/).

NOTE: You must set these response headers for every IDOL Admin that you run for different IDOL components.