How to have 2 servers, different paths with same domain?

Question

Looking for some advice on the following:

I'm wanting to have two servers with same domain. Not looking to have subdomains.

Domain: https://example.com

Server A: https://example.com/games/abcs13343/results

Server B: https://example.com/blogs/games-blog-3

Is this achievable through doing a proxy reverse on Server A or is there a better way of doing something like this without subdomains?

Answer 1

Let's say you have your 2 servers, Server A and Server B with IP_A, IP_B respectively.

The HTTP/HTTPS requests come through ports and using a basic router only ports can be forwarded to each of your 2 local server IPs.

You can use 1 of your 2 servers to act as a proxy to the other server.

Firstly forward port 80 & 443 to the server A using its ip IPA.

Let the server with ip IPA, channel the requests to the other server(s) based on the requested URL.

Depending on what Server Software you use you need to follow different approaches.

In apache for port 80 you will need to edit your configuration file:

sudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Add the lines at the end of <VirtualHost *.80>

<VirtualHost *.80>

....

RewriteRule ^/games/?(.*)$ http://{IPB}/games/$1 [P,L] 
ProxyPassReverse /games http://{IPB}/games

RewriteRule ^/blogs/?(.*)$ http://{IPB}/blogs/$1 [P,L] 
ProxyPassReverse /blogs http://{IPB}/blogs

    
</VirtualHost>

In each case, we added the ProxyPassReverse directive to ensure that any redirects issued by the backend are correctly passed on to the client.

Answer 2

Is this achievable through doing a proxy reverse on Server A or is there a better way of doing something like this without subdomains?

Yes - this is a very common use case for a reverse proxy server.

I disagree slightly with @Thanasis answer) in as much as the ideal way to do this with Apache is NOT RewriteRules, rather it is ProxyPass rules. (Indeed this is the whole purpose of mod_proxy in Apache).

The idea is in your Virtualhost to ensure mod_proxy is enabled (eg with a2enmod proxy to enable this) and then add

ProxyPass "/blogs" "https://serverb.domain"
ProxyPassReverse "/blogs" "https://serverb.domain"

If this is "to much", you can always look at using someone like Cloudflare to do it for you.