It’s been about a while since cPanel 11.1 came out and the proxy script from cpanelproxy.net that we all know and love stopped working. Well, the cPanel devs came through for us again and incorporated an Apache-based proxy feature to natively allow users behind firewalls to connect to cPanel over port 80, similar to the way the previous php-based cpanel proxy worked. This was a peace of cake on new server setups, where all you had to do was check on the proxy options in WHM “Tweak Settings” and include mod_proxy in your Apache build. However, I had a very difficult time getting this to work on previous servers that did not already have those features. After bringing this up to Mr. Ken from cPanel (who, by the way, is the most awesomest person in the cpanel bunch), I was finally able to come up with a procedure for getting this to work without having to completely recompile Apache which is a no-no on more mature production servers.
First, if you haven’t already, run a cpanel update to the latest version which at the time of my writing is 11.23. Once the update is complete, log into WHM > Tweak Settings and check off these options (only the first is required):
Add proxy VirtualHost to httpd.conf to automatically redirect unconfigured cpanel, webmail, webdisk and whm subdomains to the correct port
Automatically create cpanel, webmail, webdisk and whm proxy subdomain DNS entries for new accounts.
Allow users to create cpanel, webmail, webdisk and whm subdomains that override automatically generated proxy subdomains
Now, to install mod_proxy (for Apache 1.3 and 2.x)
Download the source for your Apache version. If you’re not sure what that is, you can find out from your phpinfo file or in some cases by typing ‘httpd -v’ from command line.
wget http://apache.mirrors.tds.net/httpd/apache_1.3.41.tar.gz
tar -xvzf apache_1.3.41.tar.gz
cd apache_1.3.41/src/modules/proxy (will just be /modules/proxy for Apache 2 sources)
You need to compile the mod_proxy module with apxs to add it to httpd.conf. For Apache 1.3.x:
/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -i -a -c mod_proxy.c
For Apache 2.2 (not sure about 2.0 since we don’t run that version on any of our systems) I found that you have to compile mod_proxy with two of its submodules in order for the proxy feature in cpanel to work:
/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -i -a -c mod_proxy.c proxy_util.c
/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs -i -a -c mod_proxy_http.c
The restart Apache and verify that it is able to start. In my case, when I just compiled the mod_proxy module I got some error about ap_proxy_lb_workers, but when I added proxy_util that fixed the problem. Then I wasn’t able to get the cpanel proxy feature to work without mod_proxy_http. There is one last step with Apache, where you need to add the proxy virtualhost entries in. cPanel has this set up as one virtualhost entry for all the subdomains as well as https, which didn’t quite work in my case because we have shared SSL certificates on the main IP. So I added the following lines between the <VirtualHost> tags for the main hostname and shared ssl hostname:
ServerAlias cpanel.* webmail.*
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cpanel\.
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://127.0.0.1:2082/$1 [P]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^webmail\.
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://127.0.0.1:2095/$1 [P]
UseCanonicalName Off
These are just the ones for webmail and cpanel, but webdisk and whm ones can be added as well.
All you need to do now is setup the subdomains so that customers can access them. The best way to do this is to specify the username:
/scripts/proxydomains --user=username add
To do all accounts on the server (which can take a while):
/scripts/proxydomains add
To list all the options for this script simply type /scripts/proxydomains .
