Proxy only non-existing files with mod_proxy and mod_rewrite

Today I got an interesting task. I had to upload some pdf documents to a site. The domain is ours, but we don’t have access to the application server that is hosting the page yet. Until we get it in our hands, I did a trick.

I enabled mod_rewrite, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http, then added the following lines to my apache config:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/$ http://172.16.72.131:8080/ [QSA,L,P]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://172.16.72.131:8080/$1 [QSA,L,P]

Order allow,deny
Allow from all

I’m not totally sure it’s actually secure, but it works for now.