Allow folders to open as individual session instead of all containing sessions.

Hi everyone,

I'm maintaining some Linux servers e.g. hosting Apache Tomcat hosting some Java based web applications, web services etc. The important thing to note is that Tomcat itself is NOT publicly available, but only using some reverse proxy setup behind Apache HTTPd. So for customer web-apps etc., browsers connect to HTTPd which forwards requests to Tomcat.

Though, there are some web-apps within Tomcat which are not for customers, but only admins like me. Those are for maintenance reasons mostly to e.g. configure other web-apps hosted for direct access by customers. Additionally, Tomcat itself might provide a web-UI which isn't exposed using HTTPd. Instead, the current approach was to start a SSH session e.g. using PuTTY on Windows, forward localhost:8081 to localhost:8080 on the server and access all web-UIs of interest that way.

RDM can make these things a bit easier by creating an individual session for each web-app of interest and handling the SSH-stuff using SSH Secure Gateway. So my new approach is creating a combination of folders and session using the following example:

• org.example.server1
  • Tomcat
    • webapp1 -> http://localhost:8080/webapp1
    • webapp2 -> http://localhost:8080/webapp2
    • webapp3 -> http://localhost:8080/webapp3

Accessing the individual web-apps work already, but currently I need to configure the whole URL per session. Instead it would be great to 1. have http://localhost:8080 on the level of the folder "Tomcat" only and inherit that at the level of the individual sessions. 2., it would as well be great if I could open the folder Tomcat like it was a session by itself to actually open the web-app behind http://localhost:8080.

According my tests, both is not possible currently or at least I don't know how. Opening a folder seems to open the contained sessions only always, not what is associated with the folder itself. Even though if it's a Workstation or Server type, I can put SSH Secure Gateway and URL into the config. So in theory everything is available.

Besides that, inheriting http://localhost:8080 and enhancing it per session by some suffix like /webapp1 doesn't seem to work as well. When inheriting some host, it can't easily be enhanced in the inheriting session, but seems to only be used as-is? Or do I need to work with variables which are used on the Tomcat-folder level, like http://localhost:8080/$WEB_APP$? Didn't get something like that to work and even if this would work, depending on how missing variables are treated it might fail my first wish.

Thanks for considering!