Plesk is a popular web hosting control panel used by many of our clients. On servers with Plesk, the control panel is located at:
https://yourdomain.com:8443
There are several problems with this URL:
1. It’s hard for users to remember the 8443 on the end and the https on the beginning of the URL.
2. Plesk by default uses a self signed SSL certificate that causes warning to be displayed in the user’s web browser.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put Plesk on a friendly URL like https://plesk.yourdomain.com?
Also lets have:
http://plesk.yourdomain.com
automatically redirect to:
https://plesk.yourdomain.com.
Now the your users don’t have to remember the https part either.
Now lets get really fancy. Suppose your customer has a domain named acme.com hosted on your server. It would be nice to have the URL:
http://acme.com/plesk
redirect to:
http://plesk.yourdomain.com.
Guess what – it can all be done! Here’s how:
1. Get an SSL certificate for plesk.yourdomain.com. A $29 cert from GoDaddy will work just fine. Place the SSL key in:
/etc/pki/tls/private/plesk.yourdomain.com.key
and the SSL certificate in:
/etc/pki/tls/certs/plesk.yourdomain.com.crt
2. Next, create /etc/httpd/conf.d/plesk_proxy.conf with the following contents:
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<pre> Redirect permanent /plesk https://plesk.yourdomain.com <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName plesk.yourdomain.com Redirect permanent / https://plesk.yourdomain.com </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:8444> ServerName plesk.yourdomain.com ErrorLog logs/plesk_proxy.error_log CustomLog logs/plesk_proxy.access_log common SSLEngine on SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 SSLCipherSuite ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM SSLCertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/plesk.yourdomain.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/pki/tls/private/plesk.yourdomain.com.key ProxyRequests Off <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> SSLProxyEngine On ProxyPass / https://127.0.0.1:8443/ ProxyPassReverse / https://127.0.0.1:8443/ </VirtualHost> |
Now just restart Apache and you’re ready to go.
Couple of issues to note:
- You’ll need to add the hostname plesk.yourdomain.com to DNS.
- Depending on your server config, you may need to place plesk.yourdomain.com on a dedicated IP address since each IP address can host only a single SSL site.