Poor Man's ALB - Apache

One complicated aspect of SEO is hosting your blog on the same domain as the rest of the site. This is arguably very simple on AWS via ALB which allows sublocation routing, but it became a nightmare when we had to move our resources awayt from AWS once we had to shutdown our startups and keep the blog churning content.

Wordpress is a lingua franca for most content online, but the way it handles URLs internally is aggregious. My first instinct was to host wordpress via nginx, using proxy_pass and SSL termination at nginx. But wordpress decided to act like a brashful teenager. Finally I caved and hosted wordpress with apache on a /blog subdomain here allround blog.

The second part of the problem was running next.js on the same host on the / path. Apache has ProxyPass, but my first attempt wasn’t very succesful and after some researching (sic) on the internet, this was the final solution that worked.

ProxyPass /blog !
Alias /blog /path/to/wordpress

<Directory /path/to/wordpress>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride Limit Options FileInfo
    DirectoryIndex index.php
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>
<Directory /path/to/wordpress/wp-content>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

ProxyPass 		/ http://localhost:3001/
ProxyPassReverse 	/ http://localhost:3001/
ProxyPreserveHost on
LogLevel warn

The trick was ProxyPass /blog ! which ensured that we can use apache for sublocation routing. On port 3001, next.js was running supervisor (my goto solution for running apps on a box).