A proxy to allow running Hoodie or CouchDB behind an Apache Server on shared hosting.

CouchDB database names and document IDs may contain slashes. Slashes inside the names need to be escaped as %2F in the URL, so CouchDB can distinguish them from the slashes around the database name. Hoodie’s API is essentially CouchDB and Hoodie uses slashes in its database names and document IDs.

CouchDB’s recommended reverse proxy setup is not suitable for shared hosting as it requires configuring mod_proxy as well as AllowEncodedSlashes – neither of which can be done in .htaccess files.

Using mod_rewrite is possible in a shared hosting setup but will convert the escaped %2F slashes back to /. Using its [B] flag will lead to double escaped %252f.

A number of problems come together here. Probably each of the involved softwares could make things easier:

• mod_rewrite letting my easily create exactly the URLs I want instead of changing the escaping
• Apache allowing proxy and slashes configuration on .htaccess level
• Hoodie not using slashes in database names and document IDs

Set up a http proxy in node that tries to fix the URLs Hoodie needs after mod_rewrite breaks them by replacing / with %2F in some places.

The setup then is, with hoodie-proxy being able to access the port Hoodie runs on:

User → Apache with mod_rewrite reverse proxy → hoodie-proxy → Hoodie

hoodie-proxy uses two parameters

• --port [-p]: the port to open the proxy on [6010]
• --target [-t]: the base URL to proxy to [http://127.0.0.1:6001]

2014 by Sven-S. Porst <[email protected]>

https://github.com/ssp/node-hoodie-proxy