Answers: Reverse Proxy Integrations

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Hey everyone,

I am working on a project where the client wants to set up the answers experience while leveraging a reverse proxy. Has anyone else gone through this in an implementation, and if so, could you share any best practices? I am mainly looking to gather information and resources so that I can speak more confidently to the integration approach.

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Hi Sam,

Great question! Excited to see our clients exploring different ways to integrate their Answers experience.

A few warnings before you proceed:

  • Reverse proxies can be difficult for a client to implement. Typically, this will take engaging IT resources to set up, as well as some back-and-forth between your team and the client’s team to troubleshoot. This can cause delays in launch.
  • Reverse proxies introduce another point of failure that could cause your Answers site to be inaccessible, should the reverse proxy go down.
  • To fully integrate the Answers experience into the site, you would need to replicate your header / footer to maintain consistency.

If your client is willing to proceed given these caveats, we have two main recommendations:

  • Host the content on a subfolder (ex. /answers)
  • /answers should be configured to redirect to /answers/ to support relative links in Answers

All other configuration will depend on 1) where you are hosting your Answers experience and 2) the configuration of your client’s main domain. There may be additional rules, like handling of 301 redirects and caching logic, that you’ll want to align on with the client.

Hope this helps!

Best,
Amani

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Also, if the concern is being able to serve under a directory off the main domain (www.brand.com/answers) rather than a subdomain, we should make sure the client is aware that the JavaScript integration option–where they include our JavaScript on a page they’re hosting–will work well in this situation. Many customers don’t want to have Pages content served in this way because they’re concerned about possible SEO impact. Whether that’s valid or not, it shouldn’t be a concern for Answers because the content is dynamic and won’t be indexed anyway.

Or at least, I think all of that is accurate. Perhaps someone should correct me if it isn’t. I’m not really an expert on this point since I’m not a Hitchhiker (yet!), but just want to participate in the community!

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