How to Serve Images Over HTTPS from a Non-HTTPS Server with Apache’s mod_proxy

Serving images over HTTPS is an important part of ensuring the security and privacy of your website’s users. However, if you have images stored on a non-HTTPS server, it can be challenging to serve them securely without triggering mixed content warnings in the user’s browser. In this article, we’ll explore how to serve images over HTTPS from a non-HTTPS server using Apache’s mod_proxy module.

What is mod_proxy?

Apache’s mod_proxy module is a powerful tool that allows you to set up a reverse proxy for your website. A reverse proxy is a server that acts as an intermediary between your web server and the client’s browser. When a request comes in, the reverse proxy fetches the content from the origin server and forwards it to the client’s browser. This allows you to serve content from multiple servers or locations, and to control how that content is delivered.

Step 1: Install mod_proxy

Before we can use mod_proxy, we need to make sure it is installed on our server. To do this, we’ll use the following command:

sudo a2enmod proxy
sudo a2enmod proxy_http
sudo systemctl restart apache2

The first command enables the mod_proxy module, while the second command enables the mod_proxy_http module, which is needed for serving HTTP requests. Finally, we restart Apache to ensure that the changes take effect.

Step 2: Configure the Reverse Proxy

Now that mod_proxy is installed, we can configure the reverse proxy to serve our images over HTTPS. To do this, we need to open the Apache configuration file for our virtual host using a text editor.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/yourdomain.com.conf

Then, we’ll add the following lines to the configuration file:

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPreserveHost On
ProxyPass /images http://yournonhttpsdomain.com/images
ProxyPassReverse /images http://yournonhttpsdomain.com/images

In the above code, we are setting up a reverse proxy that will forward requests for “/images” to the “http://yournonhttpsdomain.com/images” URL. This means that when a user’s browser requests an image from the “/images” URL, the reverse proxy will fetch the image from the non-HTTPS server and deliver it to the browser over HTTPS.

Note that we are using the “ProxyPreserveHost” directive to ensure that the hostname of the origin server is preserved in the request headers. This is important for ensuring that the non-HTTPS server can correctly process the request.

Step 3: Save and Restart Apache

Once we’ve added the configuration lines, we need to save the file and restart Apache to ensure that the changes take effect.

sudo systemctl reload apache2

Step 4: Verify that Images are Served Over HTTPS

With the reverse proxy configured, we can now test whether our images are being served over HTTPS. To do this, we can simply load an image from the “/images” URL on our website. For example, if we have an image called “example.jpg” located in the “http://yournonhttpsdomain.com/images” directory, we can load it over HTTPS using the following URL: “https://yourdomain.com/images/example.jpg“.

If the image loads correctly and there are no warnings or errors in the browser’s console, then we have successfully served the image over HTTPS from a non-HTTPS server using Apache’s mod_proxy module.

Conclusion

Serving non-HTTPS images on an HTTPS website can pose a security risk to users and result in mixed content warnings. However, using Apache’s mod_proxy module to proxy non-HTTPS images through an HTTPS site can help address this issue by providing a secure connection for users and avoiding mixed content warnings.

While using mod_proxy may add complexity to server configuration and may not be the most efficient solution for serving large numbers of images, it can be a useful solution for smaller websites or for websites with a limited number of non-HTTPS images.

Overall, it’s important to prioritize the security and privacy of website users and take steps to ensure that all content, including images, is served securely over HTTPS.