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Wikipedia behind mod_proxy

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21.01.2005 00:28 CEST - Comments [7]

The wikipedia software runs only on PHP 4 (due to bad class naming in PHPTAL), but I wanted to let the accompanying wiki to this blog to run under the same domain as the blog itself: mod_proxy to the rescue. The following lines in httpd.conf got things quite smoothly started (and you know now, how the reach the wiki with circumventing the proxy, but so what ;)): 

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /wiki/ http://blog4p.bitflux.ch/wiki/
ProxyPassReverse /wiki/ http://blog4p.bitflux.ch/wiki/

Until I got a complaint, that the wiki can't be edited anymore. This happened after I blocked a wiki-spammer by username (they are worse than comment spammers...), but since wikipedia also remembers the IP of the offending spammer (which - "thanks" to proxying - was the one of the blogserver), everyone else was also blocked... Not surprisingly, wikipedia took precautions for this scenario, just add the following to LocalSettings.php and wikipedia honors the X-Forwarded-For header added by mod_proxy: 

$wgUseSquid = true;

I don't know, if it tries some proprietary squid stuff with just this setting (there are more Squid options available in LocalSettings.php), but it seems to work. Please report, if you still encounter problems.

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Comments [7]

Alan Knowles, 21.01.2005 02:49 CEST

come on, run phpinfo() on the server, you will see something like $_SERVER['X-FORWARDED-IP'] (cant remember the exact value) set to the original value.

It would be nice if PHP swapped the REMOTE_HOST var for you, if you told it that you where behind a proxy :
php_value behind_proxy = 192.168.0.1

messing around with X-FORWARDED stuff just seems messy to me.

chregu, 21.01.2005 10:50 CEST

Alain, you're of course right. This would also work.
But setting wgUseSquid does some more magic in Wikipedia. For example, it takes all IP adresses in x-forwarded into account (there could be more than one proxy in between). There are other line of code, which use this variable, but I didn't look very deep into it.

Robbert Broersma, 21.01.2005 13:44 CEST

I've got MediaWiki running on PHP 5.03, and even on PHP 5.1-dev. To get the last running I had to adjust one line of code, and this patch has recently been accepted in the MediaWiki Bugzilla. So I don't really see the problem?

By the way: I did turn of the errors to get rid of all those hundreds of E_STRICT errors, e.a. - but it works great.

chregu, 21.01.2005 13:49 CEST

Robbert: Last time I tried with mediawiki and php5 was a few months... Maybe I should try again ;)

Jacques, 21.01.2005 19:11 CEST

You tend to need to look at the last value of the $_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'] if you are running behind squid or using the apache reverse proxy stuff.

Bernhard Seefeld, 22.01.2005 15:19 CEST

Have a look at mod_rpaf at
http://stderr.net/apache/rpaf/

It transparently changes REMOTE_HOST for all apache modules, and thus PHP4, if the request comes from a specified proxy.

It was designed exactly for your use case.

Richard Barrett, 11.05.2006 12:34 CEST

The mod_extract_forwarded Apache module also provides a consistent and secure way of taking account of Forwarded-For header. See:

http://www.openinfo.co.uk/apache/index.html

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