Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

7.9. Handling Proxy Requests

The HTTP proxy protocol was originally designed to allow users unfortunate enough to be stuck behind a firewall to access external web sites. Instead of connecting to the remote server directly, an action forbidden by the firewall, users point their browsers at a proxy server located on the firewall machine itself. The proxy goes out and fetches the requested document from the remote site and forwards the retrieved document to the user.

Nowadays most firewall systems have a web proxy built right in so there's no need for dedicated proxying servers. However, proxy servers are still useful for a variety of purposes. For example, a caching proxy (of which Apache is one example) will store frequently requested remote documents in a disk directory and return the cached documents directly to the browser instead of fetching them anew. Anonymizing proxies take the outgoing request and strip out all the headers that can be used to identify the user or his browser. By writing Apache API modules that participate in the proxy process, you can achieve your own special processing of proxy requests.

The proxy request/response protocol is nearly the same as vanilla HTTP. The major difference is that instead of requesting a server-relative URI in the request line, the client asks for a full URL, complete with scheme and host. In addition, a few optional HTTP headers beginning with Proxy- may be added to the request. For example, a normal (nonproxy) HTTP request ...