Comments on: Automatically connecting to a specific website on a port other than 80

Question: Automatically connecting to a specific website on a port other than 80

Hartster — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:55:16 -0800

Is it possible to get a browser to connect automatically to a port other than 80 for a specific website?

I'm currently running both Apache and IIS on my development computer. In order to do so, I've had to bind the IIS websites to a different port than 80 (in this case 8080). This means I have to go to local.foo.com:8080, which in the smallest possible way bugs me everso minorly.

I could just set up a bat file to switch between IIS and Apache and use port 80 for both, or I could just stop being bothered by the extra few keyboard strokes. However, I'm wondering if there's a way to setup Firefox so that local.foo.com (and just that url) automatically connects via port 8080.

By: yeoz

yeoz — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:11 -0800

um, bookmark it?

By: SemiSophos

SemiSophos — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:59:53 -0800

What you're looking for is called a reverse proxy. I'm not sure what options are available on Windows, but you basically want something to accept all the traffic on port 80, and then transparently passes the request on to whatever server and port that you want. Nginx is popular for this sort of thing on the *nix side of the world.

By: enn

enn — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:00:07 -0800

I don't know of a way to do this in Firefox. However, if I understand correctly that Apache is running on port 80, it is not difficult to set up mod_proxy so that local.foo.com/iis/ or something similar is proxied to localhost:8080.

By: rickim

rickim — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:10:33 -0800

You can accomplish this (I believe) server side via something like mod_rewrite which is a plugin for apache....
Or how bout a static page on port 80 that links or forwards to 8080...
There are probably dozens of solution, that may or may not work in your for up.

By: fatbird

fatbird — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:15:43 -0800

What enn said. Have Apache proxy the IIS sites on 8080, and as a bonus, you'll be connecting to the IIS sites on port 80.

In other words, you have a.com and b.com hosted locally. a.com is hosted by Apache, b.com is hosted by IIS. Configure Apache with named virtual hosts for a.com and b.com; configure IIS to listen for connections to b.com on 8080. For a.com, Apache serves the site. For b.com's configuration in Apache, use mod_proxy to proxy those connections to b.com:8080.

From the browser's perspective, all you'll see is a.com or b.com.

By: finite

finite — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:30:04 -0800

I don't know about windows or IIS, but in Apache on other OSes you can bind to just one IP using the Listen directive.

You can also have many different loopback IPs, like 127.0.0.2 etc.

By: Hartster

Hartster — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:43:48 -0800

Awesome, mod_rpoxy has worked a treat. Thanks muchly!

(When googling mod_proxy, reverse proxy and ports, I then came across http://ask.metafilter.com/44548/Can-apache-redirect-to-another-port-without-displaying-the-port. For some reason always feels weird stumbling across AskMe this way.)