Monthly Archives: March 2017

Custom 503 error page for Apache

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A 5xx error code is returned by a web server when something went wrong: The server was not able to process the request. For a reverse proxy, a common 5xx error message is 503, meaning that the backend server is not reachable.

In the technical architecture of my blog site, the WordPress site with my blogs is hosted on a Raspberry Pi in my living room, while external access is through a reverse proxy hosted on Amazon EC2. If now the reverse proxy on EC2 cannot reach my Raspberry Pi, a 503 error message is given.

The root cause can be that the Raspberry Pi is turned off, there is no Internet connection available for some reason (power outage, provider problem), or something else. In case this happens, EC2 reverse proxy will throw an error and try to show the Apache standard 503 error page. The web page used to display the 503 is the same for all Apache installations worldwide. Giving your users a more personalized message can be a nice touch. For instance, including a statement that you are aware of the issue, it won`t take long to get solved, or a better explanation of what happened.

For this to work, you need to have

  1. A custom 503.html file and
  2. Configure Apache to use this web page.

Create custom 503 file

This is up to you. Internet and Google are your friend.

Apache configuration

Apache has the ErrorDocument directive. For an HTTP error code you specify a HTML file to be shown. Make the 503 HTML file created by you in the above section available on the web server.

/var/www/html/error/503.html

Important: the document root of Apache is /var/www/html. For accessing the file, the browser will call the URL /error/503.html. Reference it in the Apache configuration.

sudo vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Insert

ErrorDocument 503 /error/503.html

You are done in the case of a normal web server setup. The configuration shown so fare won`t work for a reverse proxy. A reverse proxy will forward all requests to the backend server, including the request for the 503 document. To not forward /error/503.html to the backend, put /error/ in a exception list. With this, every request to /error/ won`t be forwarded by Apache, and instead be served from the local web server. To exclude /error/ from the ProxyPass rule, add:

ProxyPass /error/ !

This exclusion must be before the other ProxyPass directives. A somewhat more complete example of a Apache configuration:

<VirtualHost _default_:443>
  DocumentRoot "/var/www/html"
  ProxyPass /error/ ! 
  ErrorDocument 503 /error/503.html
  SSLProxyEngine On
  ProxyPass / https://backend/
  ProxyPassReverse / https://backend/
  SSLEngine on
</VirtualHost>

Restart Apache

sudo service httpd restart

The next time the backend server is not reachable, the reverse proxy will serve the custom 503 error page to the users.

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Download files with wget

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A tool for download web resources is wget. It comes with a feature to mirror web sites, but you can also use it to download specific files, like PDFs. This is very easy and straightforward to do:

wget <url>
Example: wget http://localhost/doc.pdf

This will instruct wget to download the file doc.pdf from localhost and save it as doc.pdf. It is not as easy when the weber service is

  • requesting authentication or
  • the URL of the PDF file ends in the same file name

Authentication

The documentation of wget states that you can provide the username and password for BASIC authentication. What about a web site that asks for SAML 2.0? You can pass HTTP headers to wget via parameter –header. This feature makes it easy: log on to the server via a browser and then copy the headers. These headers contain the session information of you user and can be used by wget to connect as an authenticated user.

How to get the HTTP headers

  1. Log on to the web site
  2. Open developer tools
  3. Select a web resource
  4. Copy the HTTP headers. For cURL, its just selecting Copy all as cURL. This gives the complete cURL command. For just the headers, select Copy Request Headers.

Example:

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/56
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch, br
Cookie: JSESSIONID=DBE1FED5C040B2DF7;

Each line is one –header parameter for wget. It is not feasible to add all these headers to each wget request individually. For maintenance and better readability these values should be read from a file. Problem: wget does not allow to read the header parameter from a file. There is no option for something like –header <file_with_headers>. What there is the . wgetrc file. This is the configuration file wget reads when called, and in this file it`s possible to define HTTP header values. For each HTTP header, create a new “header = <value>” entry in the file.

With this configured in the file, wget will send always these HTTP headers with each request. If the session cookies copied from the browser are valid the requests are authenticated and wget is able to download the file.

File name

Sometimes the file you want to download has a generic URL. Each file ends in the same file name at the server. For instance, http://localhost/category/doc.pdf, or /uid/E.pdf. In such cases, wget will download the file and save it as doc.pdf or E.pdf. This is not a problem when you download just one file, but when you download more files, like 20, wget numerate the files: E.pdf.1, E.pdf.2, E.pdf.3, …

This makes it hard to work with the files. A solution can be to check if the web server is supporting content-disposition. If so, the server should send the real file name of the archive in the HTTP response. The real file name can be seen in the Conent-Disposition header as filename.

With content-diposition, wget can save the downloaded file from /<UID>/E.pdf as <UID>.pdf instead of E.pdf. As the UID is unique, the file can easily be identified after download.

wget --content-disposition http://localhost/<uid>/E.pdf

Given the above example, the file download is saved locally as 2399104_E_20170304.pdf

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