On 11.04.2018 16:36, Christopher Schultz wrote:
André,
On 4/10/18 11:38 AM, André Warnier (tomcat) wrote:
Hi.
On 10.04.2018 15:53, Christopher Schultz wrote:
All,
I've been asked to take some static files we already have on our
(reverse-proxied) web servers and require authentication before allowing
the resources to be fetched by a client.
One way to do that would be to physically (electronically?) move the
files from the web servers to the application servers, either as a part
of the web application itself (tricky due to licensing issues of these
documents) or as a separate set of files in an arbitrary place on the
disk e.g. using <PostResources>.
Before I do that, I was thinking that maybe I could point
<PostResources> at a (private) URL that points back to the location
where these files were already available. I was kind of hoping that
simply doing <PostResources base="http://static/files/here/";
webAppMount="/static" /> or something like that.
It looks like the existing WebResourceSet implementations are all
disk-based resource providers.
It also seems like writing a simple, read-only, "non-listable"
implementation of an HTTPResourceSet might work for me.
So I'm looking for opinions on what I should do, here. I might be able
to hack-together an HttpResourceSet, but it probably won't benefit from
e.g. range-requests (the files I am serving are PDFs, which often
benefit from being able to perform range-requests) and might be fragile.
I could move the files to the application servers, but then I need to
make that a part of my app-server build process and I'd like that to
remain as simple as possible.
Finally, the files cannot go into revision-control due to licensing
restrictions, so we basically have to keep them ... "safe" until they
are deployed.
Any ideas or suggestions?
I know that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail but why
not set up a separate Apache httpd webserver for these things, and have
your reverse-proxies direct the calls there for them ?
Well, my reverse-proxies are already httpd instances, so there's no need
for ANOTHER instance.
The problem is that I need Tomcat to enforce
authentication/authorization for these resources.
Ah, but that is something which you did not mention before (that the
authentication/authorization must be done by Tomcat).
The reverse-proxy
cannot do that, and neither can some other web server that isn't in
communication with Tomcat.
Unless there is a mod_is_user_logged_in_to_tomcat that can ping Tomcat
to see if a user is indeed logged-in and then only serve the resource if
it gets back a positive response.
Exactly. That's not available off-the-shelf, but feasible at the Apache level.
(In fact, I have something just like that (mod_perl based) which uses Tomcat as an
"authenticator" for resources deployed at the Apache level).
So let me know if your current solution is still unsatisfactory and you want to move these
things back out from your app servers deployments.
Or, use URLRewriteFilter to redirect these calls to wherever you want.
I'm saying that because it doesn't really sound like you want to mix
this up too much with your Java apps..
Directing the traffic isn't the problem. Enforcing authentication is.
Thinking further about this, you are certainly not the only person who has that kind of
requirement.
And it would probably not be a big deal for the people who developed mod_proxy_ajp at the
Apache httpd level, to create such an Apache httpd "authentication provider" based on
tomcat as a back-end. (See : http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/auth.html).
I'm just saying..
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