Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

In this section we talk about issues that you may encounter when working with Germinate.

Germinate links in download files are not HTTPS

Files downloaded from Germinate sometimes contain links back to certain pages back on Germinate. This is used so that external tools can come back to Germinate for additional information.

In case you're running Germinate over HTTPS (which you should) and are also using a reverse proxy to forward requests to Tomcat, it might happen that these links don't point to https://your-server.com/germinate but rather to http://your-server.com/germinate. In most cases, this will be fine as the user will be redirected to HTTPS and won't even notice that this happens. Some external tools might not be able to handle this redirect though.

The problem here is that Tomcat doesn't know that the request came to an HTTPS resource originally (before it got proxied) and Germinate therefore doesn't have sufficient information to generate the links correctly.

To fix this, open the server.xml file under Tomcat's conf folder and add the following Connector to the Server:

<Connector port="8081" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
	connectionTimeout="20000"
	proxyName="<proxy server name, e.g. baz.hutton.ac.uk>"
	proxyPort="443"
	scheme="https"
	secure="true"/>

In this case, proxyName is the name of the proxy server. In addition, you need to change the "proxy reverse" settings of Apache. Open the file containing your configuration and identify the entries responsible for Germinate. They may look something like this:

ProxyPass         /germinate-template http://tomcat-server:8080/germinate-template
ProxyPassReverse  /germinate-template http://tomcat-server:8080/germinate-template

Change the port from 8080 to 8081 (as configured on the server.xml) so that it looks like this:

ProxyPass         /germinate-template http://tomcat-server:8081/germinate-template
ProxyPassReverse  /germinate-template http://tomcat-server:8081/germinate-template

Restart both Apache and Tomcat for this fix to work.