Issues with Confluence behind an HAProxy

Question

We have just recently purchased and installed the Confluence starter pack on a Windows Server 2016.  The initial setup was fairly easy, however we have our confluence behind a HAProxy server, so as soon as I login I get the error that my base URL is incorrect.  I have gone through all the documentation that I can find regarding setting up the "server.xml" to know that it is behind a proxy.  However, whenever I comment out the original, and un-comment the secure, behind a proxy, section, I get a 503 error and cannot connect to confluence any longer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

unknown · Answer

Actually, that is not true, I copied your settings above and replaced the upper section in my server.xml, and replaced scheme, proxyName, and proxyPort with my information and that fixed the issue.

unknown · Answer

Daniel,

Thank you for the information.  I have already configured the baseURL as you suggested in #2.

I just moved my scheme, proxyName, and ProxyPort up to the original section in the server.xml and it seems to have fixed the issue.

thank you for the suggestion.

Daniel Eads {unmonitored account} · Answer

Hey Brian!

There are two things necessary to get Confluence working correctly behind a proxy.

* As you noted, server.xml needs to be modified. I wouldn't uncomment the HTTPS connector in server.xml. That section is for having Tomcat terminate SSL, which is something you'd be better off doing in HAProxy. You just need to add scheme, proxyName, and proxyPort options to the original connector. For reference, here's a complete connector for use behind a reverse proxy like nginx or HAProxy (swap in your domain name for the proxyName option):<Connector port="8090"
       maxThreads="200"
       minSpareThreads="25"
       connectionTimeout="20000"
       enableLookups="false"
       maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
       protocol="HTTP/1.1"
       useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
       redirectPort="8443"
       acceptCount="100"
       disableUploadTimeout="true"
       scheme="https"
       proxyName="APP.DOMAIN.org"
       proxyPort="443"/>

* The baseURL in Confluence itself - this is set from System Administration in the application. Confluence will complain at you if it notices you don't have the same base URL set as what you've got in your reverse proxy setup. Here are simple instructions for setting it.

If you can, doing something like "wiki.yourcompany.com" is going to be less complicated than using a context path ("server.company.com/confluence").

Hope that helped!
Daniel