If you are running Plone, then you'll want to run a proxy in front of Plone for several reasons. It provides a greater level of security and resilience to Plone, improves performance through the use of caching and gives you a larger amount of flexibility fpr your infrastructure configuration.

When your infrastructure is based upon Microsoft, chances are you'll have Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) installed and want to run that as the proxy for your Plone site. Bear in mind that the Plone server does not have to be running on the same server, or on Windows at all. As long as IIS can make a HTTP connection it will be able to proxy the site.

This tutorial covers setting up a Plone site to use Enfold Proxy and then setting up Enfold Proxy.

The configuration of a Plone for Enfold Proxy is exactly the same as for any other proxy. You will need to ensure that your Zope site has a single Virtual Host Monster.

1. Go to your Zope instance (normally on port 8080) and ensure you are at the root of your Zope site, not your Plone site. The easy way to check is to ensure that you can see Control Panel in the site listing.
2. From the add drop down box in the top right hand corner, select "Virtual Host Monster", the id doesn't matter, it can be anything, so call it "vhm".

That's it. Now install and configure Enfold Proxy.

Further information

• Adding a Virtual Host Monster from the Zope Book
• Adding a Virtual Host Monster from the Enfold documentation

Download the Enfold Proxy from Enfold's website.

1. Stop IIS.
   
2. Install it on the IIS server. When you install it will ask if you would like to install the proxy into the default web site. If this is the one you'd like to use then check to install it.
3. Open the file called eep.ini in your Enfold Proxy installation directory, by default this will be c:\Program Files\Enfold Enterprise Proxy
4. Enter a host for each Plone you would like to proxy to for example:
   

   [host YourHost]
   lh_root = /
   vh_host = localhost:8080
   vh_root = Plone

5. That's it. Access the IIS site in your browser and you will be able to access Plone.

In the above example, the vh_host is the location of your Plone instance. The vh_root is the location of the Plone site inside the server. For more information on the options, see the documentation.

Detailed documentation and troubleshooting is available in the Enfold Proxy documentation.

If there are any problems, the first thing you should do is go to the directory you installed Enfold Proxy into and run eep_check.exe. This will test you configuration and connect to your Plone sites and tell you if it can find any problems. For example here's what happens when I try eep_check.exe when IIS is stopped:

>eep_check.exe
Enfold Proxy (2.5.2.5839) is checking your configuration.  Please wait...
Checking site 'default web site' (1)

Error found in host configuration section [u'host YourHost']
The URL (http://localhost:80/) failed to open
The server response was 500: Server Error

The local IIS host failed verification.
Please check IIS is running and that you have specified the correct
web site (execute 'eep_check --help' for options)
Enfold Proxy configuration check failed (1 error)

Other things that you might like to do that are covered in the documentation include:

• having the proxy installed into a site other than the default can be performed using:
  

  eep.exe "--server=Web Site Name"

• turning on and tweaking the caching
• having other parts of your IIS site proxied