Catalyst with Apache and proxy passing: setting the URL in the app

[tospo]

I'm posting this here for others to find because it took me quite a while to find this one myself.

The setup:

Front-end server --ProxyPass rules--> back-end server --> Catalyst FCGI server

In my case, the front-end and back-end servers are two separate instances of Apache on the same host, but they could also be on separate hosts

the front-end server uses ProxyPass rules to forward requests to the back-end server on the same host. from the Catalyst app's point of view, requests have been made to localhost:SOME-PORT, and if you are using default config settings, that is the domain that will now appear in the URLs generated by the 'uri_for' method, so all your links will be to localhost:SOME-PORT/some_page.

It is actually quite easy (once you have found it...) to get rid of this problem. Simply put

using_frontend_proxy: 1

In your app's config file to force Catalyst to parse request headers and look for the originally requested URL. It will then set the base_url accordingly.

See here for details.