545410 - Bugzilla cannot be used in different virtual hosts because urlbase is used to build static links

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: Administration, task)

Description

[Clement OUDOT]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; fr-FR; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100106 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.7
Build Identifier: 

Hello,

I use Bugzilla with several virtual hosts. For example :
* bugzilla.dom1.com
* bugzilla.dom2.com

I must set one of these values in urlbase parameter  and this fixes all links in pages, and form action too.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Configure 2 vhosts for Bugzilla (bugzilla.dom1.com & bugzilla.dom2.com)
2. Configure urlbase as bugzilla.dom1.com
3. Connect to bugzilla.dom2.com and authenticate
Actual Results:  
User is redirected to bugzilla.dom1.com and not bugzilla.dom2.com

Expected Results:  
We should still be in bugzilla.dom2.com

I corrected this problem by hacking Bugzilla/Config.pm in read_param_file() subroutine. After Bugzilla read the configuration, I override urlbase parameter.

<pre>
$params{urlbase} = "http://".$ENV{HTTP_HOST}."/" if (defined $ENV{HTTP_HOST} );
</pre>

Comment 1

[Frédéric Buclin]

Why cannot you use the PROJECT environment variable? See http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/en/html/multiple-bz-dbs.html

If they all point to the same database, you can have as many different urlbase as you want, as each VM would have its own localconfig.foo and data/foo/params files.

Comment 2

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #1)
> as you want, as each VM would have ...

I meant VH (virtual host), not VM. :)

See also bug 465887.

Comment 3

[Clement OUDOT]

Thanks for the answer.

This can be a workaround.

But definitively, I do not understand why urlbase must be set in configuration. Bugzilla should work without knowing its full adress call. In complex WEB environments (reverse proxies, high avaliability), this causes some problems.

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

(In reply to comment #3)
> This can be a workaround.

Why is that a workaround?

Comment 5

[Clement OUDOT]

For me the main problem is that urlbase is mandatory in Bugzilla, and this should not (all links can be relative and not fixed). But maybe I am missing something.

In fact, I find strange to have to manage 2 Bugzilla configurations just to be able to run Bugzilla under different virtualhost. Vhost should only be managed by Apache without impacting hosted application configuration.

Comment 6

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

I think this is a duplicate of the "don't use absolute URLs" bug.

Comment 7

[Frédéric Buclin]

Well, the bug you are talking about is bug 329638. I don't think we have another bug about this.

Comment 8

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Wow, I really thought I already filed a bug about this. Yes, we should not be using absolute URLs, whenever it's possible to avoid them.

By the way, urlbase will always be mandatory, because it's used in emails to make links to Bugzilla.

Comment 9

[Frédéric Buclin]

Note that this won't work with ssl_redirect turned on, because if you access one virtual host using HTTP, Bugzilla will use sslbase to redirect your connection. It cannot just replace http:// by https://, as discussed in bug 399069.

Comment 10

[Clement OUDOT]

So urlbase should be a parameter dedicated to email sending. If in CGI mode, the urlbase should be $ENV{HTTP_HOST} or better, no absolute URLs should be use in HTML code.

Comment 11

[Ville Koskinen]

Something that may be obvious: HTTP redirects will always need to use an absolute URI. So, if in a future version only relative URIs are used in the HTML, you'll still need to construct absolute URIs for redirects from $ENV{HTTP_HOST}.

I encountered this same problem when trying to set up access to a Bugzilla installation through SSH tunnels. If you try to log in from, say, http://localhost:1234/, Bugzilla will redirect to http://urlbase/ instead. I used the same workaround as Clement OUDOT.