Apache ProxyPass to the rescue for firewalled ports

When trying to make a web-utility I look after with its own TomCat server available to the public web from a server with only http and https ports accessible through our firewall I stumbled on Apache’s ability to proxy pages internally. This lets me give public access to a web server running on a port that is not open to the public by getting Apache to pass the content back through the publicly available port 443.

This is how it works:

ProxyPass /foo https://privateserver.company.com
ProxyPassReverse /foo https://privateserver.company.com

Will mean going to https://publicserver.company.com/foo will show that URL but actually show content from https://privateserver.company.com.

Or in my case:

ProxyPass / https://privateserver.company.com:1443
ProxyPassReverse / https://privateserver.company.com:1443

Will mean going to https://publicserver.company.com/ actually shows content from the web server on the same server running on port 1443. Very handy!