Websocket apache proxy issues with ssl

Question

So I have a site that uses https and websockets and socket.io (with node.js). The websocket will initially try to connect directly

var socket = io('https://' + socket_ip_addr + ":8443",{'forceNew': true, 'secure': true});

Here is my socket.io code (works fine with direct connection)

var http = require('https')
var fs = require('fs');

var options = {
    key:    fs.readFileSync('../certs/ssl.key'),
    cert:   fs.readFileSync('../certs/ssl.crt'),
};
var app = http.createServer(options)
var io = require('socket.io').listen(app);
app.listen(8443);

This works perfectly fine, but some users might have that random port blocked, for whatever reason, so i have a fallback method that tries to use port 443 with an apache proxy.

var socket = io('https://' + socket_ip_addr,{'forceNew': true, 'secure': true});

apache settings:

<VirtualHost *:443>
    ServerName somewebsite.ca
    ServerAlias somewebsite.ca
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html

    SSLEngine on
    SSLCertificateFile ../certs/ssl.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile ../certs/ssl.key

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  ^/socket.io            [NC]
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} transport=websocket    [NC]
    RewriteRule /(.*)           wss://localhost:8443/$1 [P,L]

    ProxyRequests off
    ProxyPass /socket.io/ https://localhost:8443/socket.io/
    ProxyPassReverse /socket.io/ https://localhost:8443/socket.io/
</VirtualHost>

I used to do this before i switched over to https, and everything worked fine. Now that i am trying to do it with https and wss, its giving me good ol' error 500 (internal server error)

My real question is this: how do i even begin to try and debug what is going wrong. Can i look at some headers somehow? Can i print some messages somewhere in the middle steps?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Alright.. I'm just dumb. I checked the apache logs and added some extra commands, now it works fine. Additional things include:

SSLProxyEngine on //apache log told me about this
SSLProxyVerify none
SSLProxyCheckPeerCN off
SSLProxyCheckPeerName off
SSLProxyCheckPeerExpire off
RequestHeader set Front-End-Https "On"