How to setup Reverse Proxy in IIS

How to setup Reverse Proxy in IIS

By: Earl Allin

Introduction

The Reverse Proxy setup allows you to run Alpha sites on your server without having to add a port number to the URL (ie: mysite.com:8585). This also offloads the SSL to IIS, which allows you to run Alpha on the separate ports internally, but have users access them using https://

Alpha Anywhere

Remove the SSL certificate from Alpha and run Alpha on port other than 443 and 80.

In this example, we will setup port 90 for one of the Alpha sites.

IIS Configuration

  1. Install the Web Platform Installer for IIS

https://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

  1. Use the Web Platform Manager to install Application Request Routing 3.0 and URL Rewrite modules if they are not already installed.

SSL Certificate Installation

Install the SSL in IIS from the Server Certificate Pane by selecting the Root Node for the Server and then clicking Server Certificates. You can click Import Certificates on the right hand side to import a .pfx cert – you will need the certificates private key password to import it.

Create IIS Website

Right click on Sites -> Add Website

Configure the site information, directory for the site under the c:\inetpub folder. This is where the site configuration will be stored, to allow you to redirect to Alpha’s Application Server.

Configure the binding for https and select the SSL certificate (which was installed in a previous step above).

Click OK when done.

URL Rewrite

Click on your Site in the connections tab, and click on URL Rewrite, and click on Add Rule(s) in the Actions pane.

Select Reverse Proxy, and click OK

Enter the information for the Rule.

Inbound Rules – the server name should be your internal server IP with the port (ie: http://10.1.100.1:90)

Make sure the Enable SSL Offloading is selected.

You should test that the URL does properly work – you can manually enter the URL on the server in a browser to confirm it accesses your application.