Motivation

This blog is written with jekyll and I wanted to be able to browse the drafts version from my Apache development portal. I wanted to keep Jekyll’s serve function on all the time, so I could write and view rendered posts at my leisure.

Process

Configure ProxyPass

Behind a password-protected location, I added the following configuration section:

    <Location "/jekyll">
        ProxyPass "http://localhost:4000"
        ProxyPassReverse "/"
    </Location>

Configure ProxyHTML

There were some resources in the header that used absolute URLs, so I decided to use mod_proxy_html to rewrite those remaining URLs. I thought about running jekyll with a temporary development configuration. Using mod proxy _config.yaml is set up for deployment and can stay that way.

I had to copy the default HTMLLinks from the Apache docs into a .conf file to be included (or into the <Location> section directly) because using it resets the definitions in that scope. I opted to use a configuration fragment on the possibility I would need the list again somewhere.

    <Location "/jekyll">
        ProxyPass "http://localhost:4000"
        ProxyPassReverse "/"
        # Rewrite HTML links 
        ProxyHTMLEnable On
        ProxyHTMLLinks "use" "xlink:href"
        # Include default ProxyHTMLLinks directives
        Include "conf-available/ProxyHTMLLinks.conf"
        # rewrite all urls in the HTML to begin with our baseurl
        ProxyHTMLURLMap "/" "/jekyll/"
    </Location>