Transparent reverse proxy written in PHP that allows you to not have to write web applications in PHP any more.
This short, single-file, 130-line PHP script is a simple and fully transparent HTTP(S) reverse proxy written in PHP that allows you to never have to use PHP again for a new project, if you feel so inclined, for example if you are forced to host on a fully 3rd-party-managed server where you can't do more than run PHP and upload files via FTP. The PHP script simply reads all requests from a browser pointed to it, forwards them (via PHP's curl library) to a web application listening at another URL (e.g. on a more powerful, more secure, more private, or more capable server in a different data center), and returns the responses transparently and unmodified.
Supports:
- Regular and XMLHttpRequests (AJAX)
- All HTTP headers without discrimination
- GET and POST verbs
- Content types (HTTP payload) without discrimination
- Redirects (internal redirects are rewritten to relative URIs)
- Multipart content type
Does not support (or not tested):
- HTTP verbs other than GET and POST (but these are usually emulated anyway)
- HTTP greater than version 1.1 (e.g. reusable connections)
- Upgrade to websocket (persistent connections)
Usage illustrated by the standard example
You have a non-PHP web application (called the "backend") listening on
https://myapp.backend.com:3000
but due to constraints you must make it available on a shared hosting server called https://example.com/subdir
which only supports PHP and can't be configured at all. On latter server, Apache (or Nginx, doesn't matter) will usually do the following:- If a URI points to a .php file, this file will be interpreted
- If a URI points to a file that is not existing, a 404 status will be returned.
Using no.php, to accomodate the second case, all URIs of the proxied web app (including static files) must be appended to the URI
https://example.com/subdir/no.php
. For example:https://example.com/subdir/no.php/images/image.png
https://example.com/subdir/no.php/people/15/edit
If your backend app supports that extra
/subdir/no.php
prefix to all paths, you are all set and ready to use no.php. Then:- Simply copy
no.php
into thesubdir
directory of example.com - Change
$backend_url
inno.php
to"https://myapp.backend.com:3000"
- Point a browser to
https://example.com/subdir/no.php