This directive lets Apache httpd adjust the URL in the Location , Content-Location and URI headers on HTTP redirect responses. This is essential when Apache httpd is used as a reverse proxy (or gateway) to avoid bypassing the reverse proxy because of HTTP redirects on the backend servers which stay behind the reverse proxy.

Only the HTTP response headers specifically mentioned above will be rewritten. Apache httpd will not rewrite other response headers, nor will it by default rewrite URL references inside HTML pages. This means that if the proxied content contains absolute URL references, they will bypass the proxy. To rewrite HTML content to match the proxy, you must load and enable mod_proxy_html .

path is the name of a local virtual path; url is a partial URL for the remote server. These parameters are used the same way as for the ProxyPass directive.

For example, suppose the local server has address http://example.com/ ; then

ProxyPass "/mirror/foo/" "http://backend.example.com/"
ProxyPassReverse "/mirror/foo/" "http://backend.example.com/"
ProxyPassReverseCookieDomain "backend.example.com" "public.example.com"
ProxyPassReverseCookiePath "/" "/mirror/foo/"

will not only cause a local request for the http://example.com/mirror/foo/bar to be internally converted into a proxy request to http://backend.example.com/bar (the functionality which ProxyPass provides here). It also takes care of redirects which the server backend.example.com sends when redirecting http://backend.example.com/bar to http://backend.example.com/quux . Apache httpd adjusts this to http://example.com/mirror/foo/quux before forwarding the HTTP redirect response to the client. Note that the hostname used for constructing the URL is chosen in respect to the setting of the UseCanonicalName directive.

Note that this ProxyPassReverse directive can also be used in conjunction with the proxy feature ( RewriteRule ... [P] ) from mod_rewrite because it doesn't depend on a corresponding ProxyPass directive.

The optional interpolate keyword, used together with ProxyPassInterpolateEnv , enables interpolation of environment variables specified using the format ${VARNAME}. Note that interpolation is not supported within the scheme portion of a URL.

When used inside a <Location> section, the first argument is omitted and the local directory is obtained from the <Location> . The same occurs inside a <LocationMatch> section, but will probably not work as intended, as ProxyPassReverse will interpret the regexp literally as a path; if needed in this situation, specify the ProxyPassReverse outside the section or in a separate <Location> section.

This directive is not supported in <Directory> or <Files> sections.