Apache httpd redirects from localhost not working in Docker

Question

To publish some ontology files I want to add redirects to w3id.org , which is simply an Apache HTTP Server, that can be configured through .htaccess files in a public GitHub repository .

Since I am not familiar with the Apache server and HTTP redirects at all, I tried to get w3id running in a local Docker container. Therefore, I followed the instruction on the httpd Docker image and created a Dockerfile containing:

FROM httpd:2.4
COPY ./public-html/ /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/

Of course, I replaced ./public-html/ with the path to my local w3id repository files.

I used the commands below to build and run the container:

$ docker build -t w3id.org .
$ docker run -dit --name w3id.org -p 8080:80 w3id.org

Afterwards, I can successfully access an endpoint at localhost:8080 which provides the simple HTML landing page of the w3id project.

However, if I try to access for example localhost:8080/security , I will not get redirected in any way, in contrast to when I access w3id.org/security , which points me to web-payments.org/vocabs/security like intended. Instead, the request provides an overview about all files inside the specific directory security , which seems to be the default behaviour for all requests.

The example .htaccess file inside the security directory contains:

Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin *
Header set Access-Control-Allow-Headers DNT,X-Mx-ReqToken,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified$
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ https://web-payments.org/vocabs/security [R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^v1$ https://web-payments.org/contexts/security-v1.jsonld [R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^v2$ https://web-payments.org/contexts/security-v2.jsonld [R=302,L]

Is this caused by my Dockerfile or the way I run the container? Do I need to enable redirects in Apache? Or maybe caused by missing HTTPS in my local setup?

How can I locally setup and test external redirects in .htaccess files?

Answer 1

You might need to enable mod_rewrite and enable overriding with .htaccess .

See the below Dockerfile for a working reference:

FROM httpd:alpine

RUN sed -i '/LoadModule rewrite_module/s/^#//g' /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf && \
    sed -i 's#AllowOverride [Nn]one#AllowOverride All#' /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

WORKDIR /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/

COPY ./public .

Then, redirecting with .htaccess can be done like this:

RewriteEngine On
Redirect /whatever http://example.com

I would suggest trying this (as is) first in the docroot, to ensure your redirects work, and then see if you want / need to move your .htaccess deeper to the security directory, and tweak further as needed.

Finally, since I am not sure if you pasted the exact docker commands you are using or just partial commands, I would suggest mounting the public directory to the container during development, this way you do not need to rebuild on every change for debug.

$ docker build -t temp .
$ docker run -i -p 3000:80 -v $PWD/public:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ temp