This particular problem makes it look like your application’s sessions aren’t working at all. A common use for Apache is to serve as a reverse proxy for many applications. This is particularly common for serving dynamic Java content, and also for Ruby on Rails applications. A pretty typical configuration is to have Apache serve static content, but to have it redirect any requests for dynamic content to Tomcat. A sample Apache configuration might look like this:
RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^/(.+\.jsp)$ ajp://localhost:8009/myapp/$1 [P] ProxyPassReverse / ajp://localhost:8009/myapp/
When Apache serves as a reverse proxy, it just passes requests directly to the backend server, and returns the results directly as received. In the case of Java applications, they typically are installed in an application directory, and specify that directory in the SetCookie header. Here is a sample SetCookie header from an HTTP response:
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=E1576192767FB8D998137B52461C023D; Path=/myapp
With the default behavior, Apache passes that Set-Cookie header un-modified to the client. It receives the cookie, but will only send the cookie for requests in the /myapp directory. The solution is a new configuration parameter for ProxyPassReverseCookiePath introduced in Apache 2.2 which tells Apache to rewrite the Path parameter according to the rules that you define. To use it, simple add this line in your Apache config:
ProxyPassReverseCookiePath /myapp /
This tells apache to replace the ‘Path=/myapp’ in the Set-Cookie header with ‘Path=/’. That should tell your browser about the application’s path correctly, and let your sessions work correctly
I thought this topic was familiar when writing this post. Turns out I already wrote about the same thing about 8 months ago Here