Solution for Subversion 502 Bad Gateway problem when using Forefront as reverse proxy

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Just as a slight note to self, but possibly useful for others running Subversion under Apache 2 on Windows (2008 in my case) behind Forefront TMG (nextgen ISA Server). The setup was working very good until I tried committing a move or a copy from my local machine. Typically things started going wrong when doing renames with ReSharper through VisualSVN in Visual Studio.You'll see errors like these:

"Server sent unexpected return value (502 Bad Gateway) in response to COPY"

Some research will quite quickly identify the problem as related to the use of a reverse proxy (Forefront in my case) and problems when using https externally and http internally. Christian Stocker suggests using a perl script to solve this problem, and Tor Håkon Haugen adds some more SSL config, but there is a much simpler solution available if your setup is much like mine. Just add this line to your httpd.conf:

RequestHeader edit Destination ^https http early

9 Comments

plz tell me how can i solve this problem

bintkhalid - Tuesday, January 20, 2009 10:03:31 AM

Thanks for the tip. It solved my problem.
It seems to be just related to the external https internal http on a reverse proxy. On my case, I was using lighttpd to proxy subversion stuff to apache via http on the localhost.

Renato Cunha - Tuesday, April 28, 2009 12:45:23 AM

Awesome fix. thanks!

Jeremy - Wednesday, May 13, 2009 4:51:20 PM

Works well thanks you :)

Jan - Tuesday, May 26, 2009 8:45:19 AM

Doesnt work for me. get an apache error at the time of restart says,.. "RequestHeader too many arguments" Using apache 2.2

SSan - Sunday, June 21, 2009 7:43:02 PM

@SSan -- The 'edit' directive only came in a version 2.2.4, you may need to upgrade your Apache installation.

Neil - Monday, July 27, 2009 10:50:37 AM

I just banged my head into brick wall for about an hour trying to get this work so word of warning for others:

RequestHeader directive DOES NOT WORK when placed inside Location block and Apache gives absolutely no warning about this when started.

I tried to be smart and add this fix inside my (Location /svn/) where I have all other settings too. The lack of mod_headers' debug capabilities didn't help much either.

Jussi - Sunday, October 25, 2009 11:50:29 AM

Worked for me as well thanks a ton man you rock.

Vishwajeet Singh - Wednesday, March 24, 2010 1:55:15 AM

Wow, I ran into this error after disabling some server-side encryption and thought to myself "Oh man, here comes hours of sweat and tears".

Found this article in less than a minute and now I'm golden. Thanks so much.

Branden Visser - Monday, May 31, 2010 5:55:23 PM

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