Why do I get "Type does not correspond to an entity on this site" when POSTing to REST api behind an Apache Reverse proxy?

Question

I have the REST api configured to allow POSTing new users to /entity/user. On my local machine, it works just fine. Once I push up to my remote host, it stops working.

The key difference is that on my local machine, my site is running in a docker container bound to port 6050, so all rest calls go to localhost:6050.

On my remote host, I have docker configured behind an Apache 2.4 reverse proxy. So the docker container is still bound to 127.0.0.1:6050, but all requests should go to https://sub.example.tld/.

To summarize, posting a new user to http://localhost:6050/entity/user?_format=hal_json, with the appropriate X-CSRF-Token and Content-Type headers set, works. It returns 200.

Posting to https://sub.example.tld/entity/user?_format=hal_json, with the appropriate X-CSRF-Token and Content-Type headers set, does not. It returns 422 Unprocessable Entity.

{"message":"Type https:\/\/sub.example.tld\/rest\/type\/user\/user?_format=hal_json does not correspond to an entity on this site."}

In the recent log messages, I see:

Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Exception\UnprocessableEntityHttpException: Type http://sub.example.tld/rest/type/user/user?_format=hal_json does not correspond to an entity on this site. in Drupal\rest\RequestHandler->deserialize() (line 201 of /var/www/html/web/core/modules/rest/src/RequestHandler.php).

I do manually set the user's "_links" array:

"_links": {
        "type": {
          "href": "https://sub.example.tld/rest/type/user/user?_format=hal_json"
        }
      },

I know that authentication isn't the issue. My code is successfully accessing views that require authentication.

Since I think it might be something to do with these settings, I do have the following set:

• $settings['trusted_host_patterns'] = ["$sub\.example\.tld$"]
• $settings['reverse_proxy'] = TRUE;
• $settings['reverse_proxy_addresses'] = ["internal network ip","172.18.0.1","127.0.0.1"];

I'm running Drupal 8.7.3.

My docker image is based on php:7.1-apache.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

The solution is to remember set the base url of any _links href values to use http if Drupal expects it, and https if Drupal, instead, expects that.

In my case, I was using https, but the https connection was terminated at the Apache reverse proxy, so Drupal wanted http.

Using a REST extension to test with let me manually change the links array to reflect that, and the user was created just fine.

Also, the "type" href should not have the _format=hal_json on it.