Customize Service Desk URL

[Lego Silver]

We are trying to setup a friendly URL to http://domain/servicedesk/customer/1 from http://domain following this link - https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-customize-customer-portal-url-in-jira-service-desk-server-847755218.html\\
However, the instructions doesn't work. The URL does redirect as per the access.log with a bunch of,
[12/Apr/2017:02:29:04 +0000] "GET /servicedesk/customer/portal/1 HTTP/1.1" 301 - 0 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" "-"

There is no expected POST response from the application when the above path is hit under normal circumstances.
We are aware that Atlassian will not be providing help on redirect setup issues but want to know why a response is not seen to a valid URL that is redirected and if there are any pre-requisites for POST to come up and the page to be seen.

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

This is pretty easy to do in a reverse proxy. Many clients that we work with want their Service Desk to have a dedicated URL that is not the same as their normal JIRA.  It's pretty easy to do this with mod_proxy in Apache and Nginx has similar capability if you prefer that.  I'd leave the Tomcat config alone, since it doesn't survive an upgrade.

[Lego Silver]

Thank you for your response. 

Our Service Desk sits on an AWS instance served by an ELB on the front end. So the ELB forwards port 80 to port 8181 on the backend which the Jira service is listening on. 

To make reverse proxy work, we assume, we would need to proxy all requests from 80 to 8181 on Apache and rewrite helpdesk.it.com to helpdesk.it.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/1? 

Would this work? 

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

That sounds right.  We typically see jira.domain.com being used for Dev teams and when ITSM gets added, the request is to have helpdesk.domain.com. In this example, the rewrite rule points helpdesk.domain.com to jira.domain.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/1 There's no reason why the hostname needs to be different, though.  Just be sure to check that your rewrite rule doesn't have unintended consequenses before releasing to production.

[Lego Silver]

Works great. I see an error but it is not related to the redirect but an auth mechanism. Thanks for your help!

[Lego Silver]

So just to round of what I did as per Dave's suggestion for others - 

Edited the server.xml file to add this to the connector tag,

proxyName="my.domain.com"
proxyPort="80"
scheme="http"

Added a virtual block setting in /etc/httpd/conf.d/servicedesk.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName my.comain.com

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyVia Off

<Proxy *>
#Require all granted
</Proxy>

ProxyPass / http://localhost:8686/
ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8686/

</VirtualHost>

Restart httpd service and it should work.