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<title>URL Rewriting Guide - Apache HTTP Server</title>
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<p class="apache">Apache HTTP Server Version 2.3</p>
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<p>This document supplements the <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>
<a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">reference documentation</a>.
It describes how one can use Apache's <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>
to solve typical URL-based problems with which webmasters are
commonly confronted. We give detailed descriptions on how to
solve each problem by configuring URL rewriting rulesets.</p>
<div class="warning">ATTENTION: Depending on your server configuration
it may be necessary to slightly change the examples for your
situation, e.g. adding the <code>[PT]</code> flag when
additionally using <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_alias.html">mod_alias</a></code> and
<code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_userdir.html">mod_userdir</a></code>, etc. Or rewriting a ruleset
to fit in <code>.htaccess</code> context instead
of per-server context. Always try to understand what a
particular ruleset really does before you use it. This
avoids many problems.</div>
</div>
<div id="quickview"><ul id="toc"><li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#canonicalurl">Canonical URLs</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#moveddocroot">Moved <code>DocumentRoot</code></a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#trailingslash">Trailing Slash Problem</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#setenvvars">Set Environment Variables According To URL Parts</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#uservhosts">Virtual Hosts Per User</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#redirecthome">Redirect Homedirs For Foreigners</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#redirectanchors">Redirecting Anchors</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#time-dependent">Time-Dependent Rewriting</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#external-rewriting">External Rewriting Engine</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#structuredhomedirs">Structured Homedirs</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#dynamic-mirror">Dynamic Mirror</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#retrieve-missing-data">Retrieve Missing Data from Intranet</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#load-balancing">Load Balancing</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#new-mime-type">New MIME-type, New Service</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#autorefresh">Document With Autorefresh</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#mass-virtual-hosting">Mass Virtual Hosting</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#proxy-deny">Proxy Deny</a></li>
<li><img alt="" src="/images/down.gif" /> <a href="#referer-deflector">Referer-based Deflector</a></li>
</ul><h3>See also</h3><ul class="seealso"><li><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">Module
documentation</a></li><li><a href="intro.html">mod_rewrite
introduction</a></li><li><a href="rewrite_guide_advanced.html">Advanced Rewrite Guide - advanced
useful examples</a></li><li><a href="tech.html">Technical details</a></li></ul></div>
<div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="canonicalurl" id="canonicalurl">Canonical URLs</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>On some webservers there are more than one URL for a
resource. Usually there are canonical URLs (which should be
actually used and distributed) and those which are just
shortcuts, internal ones, etc. Independent of which URL the
user supplied with the request he should finally see the
canonical one only.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>We do an external HTTP redirect for all non-canonical
URLs to fix them in the location view of the Browser and
for all subsequent requests. In the example ruleset below
we replace <code>/~user</code> by the canonical
<code>/u/user</code> and fix a missing trailing slash for
<code>/u/user</code>.</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteRule ^/<strong>~</strong>([^/]+)/?(.*) /<strong>u</strong>/$1/$2 [<strong>R</strong>]
RewriteRule ^/u/(<strong>[^/]+</strong>)$ /$1/$2<strong>/</strong> [<strong>R</strong>]
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="moveddocroot" id="moveddocroot">Moved <code>DocumentRoot</code></a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Usually the <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/core.html#documentroot">DocumentRoot</a></code>
of the webserver directly relates to the URL "<code>/</code>".
But often this data is not really of top-level priority. For example,
you may wish for visitors, on first entering a site, to go to a
particular subdirectory <code>/about/</code>. This may be accomplished
using the following ruleset:</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>We redirect the URL <code>/</code> to
<code>/about/</code>:
</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule <strong>^/$</strong> /about/ [<strong>R</strong>]
</pre></div>
<p>Note that this can also be handled using the <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectmatch">RedirectMatch</a></code> directive:</p>
<div class="example"><p><code>
RedirectMatch ^/$ http://example.com/about/
</code></p></div>
<p>Note also that the example rewrites only the root URL. That is, it
rewrites a request for <code>http://example.com/</code>, but not a
request for <code>http://example.com/page.html</code>. If you have in
fact changed your document root - that is, if <strong>all</strong> of
your content is in fact in that subdirectory, it is greatly preferable
to simply change your <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/core.html#documentroot">DocumentRoot</a></code>
directive, rather than rewriting URLs.</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="trailingslash" id="trailingslash">Trailing Slash Problem</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd><p>The vast majority of "trailing slash" problems can be dealt
with using the techniques discussed in the <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/FAQ-E.html#set-servername">FAQ
entry</a>. However, occasionally, there is a need to use mod_rewrite
to handle a case where a missing trailing slash causes a URL to
fail. This can happen, for example, after a series of complex
rewrite rules.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>The solution to this subtle problem is to let the server
add the trailing slash automatically. To do this
correctly we have to use an external redirect, so the
browser correctly requests subsequent images etc. If we
only did a internal rewrite, this would only work for the
directory page, but would go wrong when any images are
included into this page with relative URLs, because the
browser would request an in-lined object. For instance, a
request for <code>image.gif</code> in
<code>/~quux/foo/index.html</code> would become
<code>/~quux/image.gif</code> without the external
redirect!</p>
<p>So, to do this trick we write:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~quux/
RewriteRule ^foo<strong>$</strong> foo<strong>/</strong> [<strong>R</strong>]
</pre></div>
<p>Alternately, you can put the following in a
top-level <code>.htaccess</code> file in the content directory.
But note that this creates some processing overhead.</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~quux/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} <strong>-d</strong>
RewriteRule ^(.+<strong>[^/]</strong>)$ $1<strong>/</strong> [R]
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="setenvvars" id="setenvvars">Set Environment Variables According To URL Parts</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Perhaps you want to keep status information between
requests and use the URL to encode it. But you don't want
to use a CGI wrapper for all pages just to strip out this
information.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>We use a rewrite rule to strip out the status information
and remember it via an environment variable which can be
later dereferenced from within XSSI or CGI. This way a
URL <code>/foo/S=java/bar/</code> gets translated to
<code>/foo/bar/</code> and the environment variable named
<code>STATUS</code> is set to the value "java".</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)/<strong>S=([^/]+)</strong>/(.*) $1/$3 [E=<strong>STATUS:$2</strong>]
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="uservhosts" id="uservhosts">Virtual Hosts Per User</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Assume that you want to provide
<code>www.<strong>username</strong>.host.domain.com</code>
for the homepage of username via just DNS A records to the
same machine and without any virtualhosts on this
machine.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>For HTTP/1.0 requests there is no solution, but for
HTTP/1.1 requests which contain a Host: HTTP header we
can use the following ruleset to rewrite
<code>http://www.username.host.com/anypath</code>
internally to <code>/home/username/anypath</code>:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{<strong>HTTP_HOST</strong>} ^www\.<strong>([^.]+)</strong>\.host\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) /home/<strong>%1</strong>$1
</pre></div>
<p>Parentheses used in a <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritecond">RewriteCond</a></code> are captured into the
backreferences <code>%1</code>, <code>%2</code>, etc, while parentheses
used in <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewriterule">RewriteRule</a></code> are
captured into the backreferences <code>$1</code>, <code>$2</code>,
etc.</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="redirecthome" id="redirecthome">Redirect Homedirs For Foreigners</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>We want to redirect homedir URLs to another webserver
<code>www.somewhere.com</code> when the requesting user
does not stay in the local domain
<code>ourdomain.com</code>. This is sometimes used in
virtual host contexts.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Just a rewrite condition:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} <strong>!^.+\.ourdomain\.com$</strong>
RewriteRule ^(/~.+) http://www.somewhere.com/$1 [R,L]
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="redirectanchors" id="redirectanchors">Redirecting Anchors</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>By default, redirecting to an HTML anchor doesn't work,
because mod_rewrite escapes the <code>#</code> character,
turning it into <code>%23</code>. This, in turn, breaks the
redirection.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Use the <code>[NE]</code> flag on the
<code>RewriteRule</code>. NE stands for No Escape.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="time-dependent" id="time-dependent">Time-Dependent Rewriting</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>When tricks like time-dependent content should happen a
lot of webmasters still use CGI scripts which do for
instance redirects to specialized pages. How can it be done
via <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>?</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>There are a lot of variables named <code>TIME_xxx</code>
for rewrite conditions. In conjunction with the special
lexicographic comparison patterns <code>&lt;STRING</code>,
<code>&gt;STRING</code> and <code>=STRING</code> we can
do time-dependent redirects:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} &gt;0700
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR}%{TIME_MIN} &lt;1900
RewriteRule ^foo\.html$ foo.day.html
RewriteRule ^foo\.html$ foo.night.html
</pre></div>
<p>This provides the content of <code>foo.day.html</code>
under the URL <code>foo.html</code> from
<code>07:01-18:59</code> and at the remaining time the
contents of <code>foo.night.html</code>. Just a nice
feature for a homepage...</p>
<div class="warning"><code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_cache.html">mod_cache</a></code>, intermediate proxies
and browsers may each cache responses and cause the either page to be
shown outside of the time-window configured.
<code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_expires.html">mod_expires</a></code> may be used to control this
effect.</div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="external-rewriting" id="external-rewriting">External Rewriting Engine</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>A FAQ: How can we solve the FOO/BAR/QUUX/etc.
problem? There seems no solution by the use of
<code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>...</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Use an external <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritemap">RewriteMap</a></code>, i.e. a program which acts
like a <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html#rewritemap">RewriteMap</a></code>. It is run once on startup of Apache
receives the requested URLs on <code>STDIN</code> and has
to put the resulting (usually rewritten) URL on
<code>STDOUT</code> (same order!).</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap quux-map <strong>prg:</strong>/path/to/map.quux.pl
RewriteRule ^/~quux/(.*)$ /~quux/<strong>${quux-map:$1}</strong>
</pre></div>
<div class="example"><pre>
#!/path/to/perl
# disable buffered I/O which would lead
# to deadloops for the Apache server
$| = 1;
# read URLs one per line from stdin and
# generate substitution URL on stdout
while (&lt;&gt;) {
s|^foo/|bar/|;
print $_;
}
</pre></div>
<p>This is a demonstration-only example and just rewrites
all URLs <code>/~quux/foo/...</code> to
<code>/~quux/bar/...</code>. Actually you can program
whatever you like. But notice that while such maps can be
<strong>used</strong> also by an average user, only the
system administrator can <strong>define</strong> it.</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="structuredhomedirs" id="structuredhomedirs">Structured Homedirs</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Some sites with thousands of users use a
structured homedir layout, <em>i.e.</em> each homedir is in a
subdirectory which begins (for instance) with the first
character of the username. So, <code>/~foo/anypath</code>
is <code>/home/<strong>f</strong>/foo/.www/anypath</code>
while <code>/~bar/anypath</code> is
<code>/home/<strong>b</strong>/bar/.www/anypath</code>.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>We use the following ruleset to expand the tilde URLs
into the above layout.</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/~(<strong>([a-z])</strong>[a-z0-9]+)(.*) /home/<strong>$2</strong>/$1/.www$3
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="dynamic-mirror" id="dynamic-mirror">Dynamic Mirror</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Assume there are nice web pages on remote hosts we want
to bring into our namespace. For FTP servers we would use
the <code>mirror</code> program which actually maintains an
explicit up-to-date copy of the remote data on the local
machine. For a web server we could use the program
<code>webcopy</code> which runs via HTTP. But both
techniques have a major drawback: The local copy is
always only as up-to-date as the last time we ran the program. It
would be much better if the mirror was not a static one we
have to establish explicitly. Instead we want a dynamic
mirror with data which gets updated automatically
as needed on the remote host(s).</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>To provide this feature we map the remote web page or even
the complete remote web area to our namespace by the use
of the <dfn>Proxy Throughput</dfn> feature
(flag <code>[P]</code>):</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~quux/
RewriteRule ^<strong>hotsheet/</strong>(.*)$ <strong>http://www.tstimpreso.com/hotsheet/</strong>$1 [<strong>P</strong>]
</pre></div>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /~quux/
RewriteRule ^<strong>usa-news\.html</strong>$ <strong>http://www.quux-corp.com/news/index.html</strong> [<strong>P</strong>]
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="retrieve-missing-data" id="retrieve-missing-data">Retrieve Missing Data from Intranet</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>This is a tricky way of virtually running a corporate
(external) Internet web server
(<code>www.quux-corp.dom</code>), while actually keeping
and maintaining its data on an (internal) Intranet web server
(<code>www2.quux-corp.dom</code>) which is protected by a
firewall. The trick is that the external web server retrieves
the requested data on-the-fly from the internal
one.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>First, we must make sure that our firewall still
protects the internal web server and only the
external web server is allowed to retrieve data from it.
On a packet-filtering firewall, for instance, we could
configure a firewall ruleset like the following:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
<strong>ALLOW</strong> Host www.quux-corp.dom Port &gt;1024 --&gt; Host www2.quux-corp.dom Port <strong>80</strong>
<strong>DENY</strong> Host * Port * --&gt; Host www2.quux-corp.dom Port <strong>80</strong>
</pre></div>
<p>Just adjust it to your actual configuration syntax.
Now we can establish the <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>
rules which request the missing data in the background
through the proxy throughput feature:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteRule ^/~([^/]+)/?(.*) /home/$1/.www/$2 [C]
# REQUEST_FILENAME usage below is correct in this per-server context example
# because the rule that references REQUEST_FILENAME is chained to a rule that
# sets REQUEST_FILENAME.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} <strong>!-f</strong>
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} <strong>!-d</strong>
RewriteRule ^/home/([^/]+)/.www/?(.*) http://<strong>www2</strong>.quux-corp.dom/~$1/pub/$2 [<strong>P</strong>]
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="load-balancing" id="load-balancing">Load Balancing</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Suppose we want to load balance the traffic to
<code>www.example.com</code> over <code>www[0-5].example.com</code>
(a total of 6 servers). How can this be done?</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>There are many possible solutions for this problem.
We will first discuss a common DNS-based method,
and then one based on <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<strong>DNS Round-Robin</strong>
<p>The simplest method for load-balancing is to use
DNS round-robin.
Here you just configure <code>www[0-9].example.com</code>
as usual in your DNS with A (address) records, e.g.,</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
www0 IN A 1.2.3.1
www1 IN A 1.2.3.2
www2 IN A 1.2.3.3
www3 IN A 1.2.3.4
www4 IN A 1.2.3.5
www5 IN A 1.2.3.6
</pre></div>
<p>Then you additionally add the following entries:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
www IN A 1.2.3.1
www IN A 1.2.3.2
www IN A 1.2.3.3
www IN A 1.2.3.4
www IN A 1.2.3.5
</pre></div>
<p>Now when <code>www.example.com</code> gets
resolved, <code>BIND</code> gives out <code>www0-www5</code>
- but in a permutated (rotated) order every time.
This way the clients are spread over the various
servers. But notice that this is not a perfect load
balancing scheme, because DNS resolutions are
cached by clients and other nameservers, so
once a client has resolved <code>www.example.com</code>
to a particular <code>wwwN.example.com</code>, all its
subsequent requests will continue to go to the same
IP (and thus a single server), rather than being
distributed across the other available servers. But the
overall result is
okay because the requests are collectively
spread over the various web servers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<strong>DNS Load-Balancing</strong>
<p>A sophisticated DNS-based method for
load-balancing is to use the program
<code>lbnamed</code> which can be found at <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/">
http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/</a>.
It is a Perl 5 program which, in conjunction with auxiliary
tools, provides real load-balancing via
DNS.</p>
</li>
<li>
<strong>Proxy Throughput Round-Robin</strong>
<p>In this variant we use <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>
and its proxy throughput feature. First we dedicate
<code>www0.example.com</code> to be actually
<code>www.example.com</code> by using a single</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
www IN CNAME www0.example.com.
</pre></div>
<p>entry in the DNS. Then we convert
<code>www0.example.com</code> to a proxy-only server,
i.e., we configure this machine so all arriving URLs
are simply passed through its internal proxy to one of
the 5 other servers (<code>www1-www5</code>). To
accomplish this we first establish a ruleset which
contacts a load balancing script <code>lb.pl</code>
for all URLs.</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteMap lb prg:/path/to/lb.pl
RewriteRule ^/(.+)$ ${lb:$1} [P,L]
</pre></div>
<p>Then we write <code>lb.pl</code>:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
#!/path/to/perl
##
## lb.pl -- load balancing script
##
$| = 1;
$name = "www"; # the hostname base
$first = 1; # the first server (not 0 here, because 0 is myself)
$last = 5; # the last server in the round-robin
$domain = "foo.dom"; # the domainname
$cnt = 0;
while (&lt;STDIN&gt;) {
$cnt = (($cnt+1) % ($last+1-$first));
$server = sprintf("%s%d.%s", $name, $cnt+$first, $domain);
print "http://$server/$_";
}
##EOF##
</pre></div>
<div class="note">A last notice: Why is this useful? Seems like
<code>www0.example.com</code> still is overloaded? The
answer is yes, it is overloaded, but with plain proxy
throughput requests, only! All SSI, CGI, ePerl, etc.
processing is handled done on the other machines.
For a complicated site, this may work well. The biggest
risk here is that www0 is now a single point of failure --
if it crashes, the other servers are inaccessible.</div>
</li>
<li>
<strong>Dedicated Load Balancers</strong>
<p>There are more sophisticated solutions, as well. Cisco,
F5, and several other companies sell hardware load
balancers (typically used in pairs for redundancy), which
offer sophisticated load balancing and auto-failover
features. There are software packages which offer similar
features on commodity hardware, as well. If you have
enough money or need, check these out. The <a href="http://vegan.net/lb/">lb-l mailing list</a> is a
good place to research.</p>
</li>
</ol>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="new-mime-type" id="new-mime-type">New MIME-type, New Service</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>On the net there are many nifty CGI programs. But
their usage is usually boring, so a lot of webmasters
don't use them. Even Apache's Action handler feature for
MIME-types is only appropriate when the CGI programs
don't need special URLs (actually <code>PATH_INFO</code>
and <code>QUERY_STRINGS</code>) as their input. First,
let us configure a new file type with extension
<code>.scgi</code> (for secure CGI) which will be processed
by the popular <code>cgiwrap</code> program. The problem
here is that for instance if we use a Homogeneous URL Layout
(see above) a file inside the user homedirs might have a URL
like <code>/u/user/foo/bar.scgi</code>, but
<code>cgiwrap</code> needs URLs in the form
<code>/~user/foo/bar.scgi/</code>. The following rule
solves the problem:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteRule ^/[uge]/<strong>([^/]+)</strong>/\.www/(.+)\.scgi(.*) ...
... /internal/cgi/user/cgiwrap/~<strong>$1</strong>/$2.scgi$3 [NS,<strong>T=application/x-http-cgi</strong>]
</pre></div>
<p>Or assume we have some more nifty programs:
<code>wwwlog</code> (which displays the
<code>access.log</code> for a URL subtree) and
<code>wwwidx</code> (which runs Glimpse on a URL
subtree). We have to provide the URL area to these
programs so they know which area they are really working with.
But usually this is complicated, because they may still be
requested by the alternate URL form, i.e., typically we would
run the <code>swwidx</code> program from within
<code>/u/user/foo/</code> via hyperlink to</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
/internal/cgi/user/swwidx?i=/u/user/foo/
</pre></div>
<p>which is ugly, because we have to hard-code
<strong>both</strong> the location of the area
<strong>and</strong> the location of the CGI inside the
hyperlink. When we have to reorganize, we spend a
lot of time changing the various hyperlinks.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>The solution here is to provide a special new URL format
which automatically leads to the proper CGI invocation.
We configure the following:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteRule ^/([uge])/([^/]+)(/?.*)/\* /internal/cgi/user/wwwidx?i=/$1/$2$3/
RewriteRule ^/([uge])/([^/]+)(/?.*):log /internal/cgi/user/wwwlog?f=/$1/$2$3
</pre></div>
<p>Now the hyperlink to search at
<code>/u/user/foo/</code> reads only</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
HREF="*"
</pre></div>
<p>which internally gets automatically transformed to</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
/internal/cgi/user/wwwidx?i=/u/user/foo/
</pre></div>
<p>The same approach leads to an invocation for the
access log CGI program when the hyperlink
<code>:log</code> gets used.</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="autorefresh" id="autorefresh">Document With Autorefresh</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Wouldn't it be nice, while creating a complex web page, if
the web browser would automatically refresh the page every
time we save a new version from within our editor?
Impossible?</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>No! We just combine the MIME multipart feature, the
web server NPH feature, and the URL manipulation power of
<code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>. First, we establish a new
URL feature: Adding just <code>:refresh</code> to any
URL causes the 'page' to be refreshed every time it is
updated on the filesystem.</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteRule ^(/[uge]/[^/]+/?.*):refresh /internal/cgi/apache/nph-refresh?f=$1
</pre></div>
<p>Now when we reference the URL</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
/u/foo/bar/page.html:refresh
</pre></div>
<p>this leads to the internal invocation of the URL</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
/internal/cgi/apache/nph-refresh?f=/u/foo/bar/page.html
</pre></div>
<p>The only missing part is the NPH-CGI script. Although
one would usually say "left as an exercise to the reader"
;-) I will provide this, too.</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
#!/sw/bin/perl
##
## nph-refresh -- NPH/CGI script for auto refreshing pages
## Copyright (c) 1997 Ralf S. Engelschall, All Rights Reserved.
##
$| = 1;
# split the QUERY_STRING variable
@pairs = split(/&amp;/, $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'});
foreach $pair (@pairs) {
($name, $value) = split(/=/, $pair);
$name =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
$name = 'QS_' . $name;
$value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
eval "\$$name = \"$value\"";
}
$QS_s = 1 if ($QS_s eq '');
$QS_n = 3600 if ($QS_n eq '');
if ($QS_f eq '') {
print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;ERROR&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;: No file given\n";
exit(0);
}
if (! -f $QS_f) {
print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "&amp;lt;b&amp;gt;ERROR&amp;lt;/b&amp;gt;: File $QS_f not found\n";
exit(0);
}
sub print_http_headers_multipart_begin {
print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
$bound = "ThisRandomString12345";
print "Content-type: multipart/x-mixed-replace;boundary=$bound\n";
&amp;print_http_headers_multipart_next;
}
sub print_http_headers_multipart_next {
print "\n--$bound\n";
}
sub print_http_headers_multipart_end {
print "\n--$bound--\n";
}
sub displayhtml {
local($buffer) = @_;
$len = length($buffer);
print "Content-type: text/html\n";
print "Content-length: $len\n\n";
print $buffer;
}
sub readfile {
local($file) = @_;
local(*FP, $size, $buffer, $bytes);
($x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $size) = stat($file);
$size = sprintf("%d", $size);
open(FP, "&amp;lt;$file");
$bytes = sysread(FP, $buffer, $size);
close(FP);
return $buffer;
}
$buffer = &amp;readfile($QS_f);
&amp;print_http_headers_multipart_begin;
&amp;displayhtml($buffer);
sub mystat {
local($file) = $_[0];
local($time);
($x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $x, $mtime) = stat($file);
return $mtime;
}
$mtimeL = &amp;mystat($QS_f);
$mtime = $mtime;
for ($n = 0; $n &amp;lt; $QS_n; $n++) {
while (1) {
$mtime = &amp;mystat($QS_f);
if ($mtime ne $mtimeL) {
$mtimeL = $mtime;
sleep(2);
$buffer = &amp;readfile($QS_f);
&amp;print_http_headers_multipart_next;
&amp;displayhtml($buffer);
sleep(5);
$mtimeL = &amp;mystat($QS_f);
last;
}
sleep($QS_s);
}
}
&amp;print_http_headers_multipart_end;
exit(0);
##EOF##
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="mass-virtual-hosting" id="mass-virtual-hosting">Mass Virtual Hosting</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>The <code class="directive"><a href="/mod/core.html#virtualhost">&lt;VirtualHost&gt;</a></code> feature of Apache is nice
and works great when you just have a few dozen
virtual hosts. But when you are an ISP and have hundreds of
virtual hosts, this feature is suboptimal.</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>To provide this feature we map the remote web page or even
the complete remote web area to our namespace using the
<dfn>Proxy Throughput</dfn> feature (flag <code>[P]</code>):</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
##
## vhost.map
##
www.vhost1.dom:80 /path/to/docroot/vhost1
www.vhost2.dom:80 /path/to/docroot/vhost2
:
www.vhostN.dom:80 /path/to/docroot/vhostN
</pre></div>
<div class="example"><pre>
##
## httpd.conf
##
:
# use the canonical hostname on redirects, etc.
UseCanonicalName on
:
# add the virtual host in front of the CLF-format
CustomLog /path/to/access_log "%{VHOST}e %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %&gt;s %b"
:
# enable the rewriting engine in the main server
RewriteEngine on
# define two maps: one for fixing the URL and one which defines
# the available virtual hosts with their corresponding
# DocumentRoot.
RewriteMap lowercase int:tolower
RewriteMap vhost txt:/path/to/vhost.map
# Now do the actual virtual host mapping
# via a huge and complicated single rule:
#
# 1. make sure we don't map for common locations
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/commonurl1/.*
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/commonurl2/.*
:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/commonurlN/.*
#
# 2. make sure we have a Host header, because
# currently our approach only supports
# virtual hosting through this header
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
#
# 3. lowercase the hostname
RewriteCond ${lowercase:%{HTTP_HOST}|NONE} ^(.+)$
#
# 4. lookup this hostname in vhost.map and
# remember it only when it is a path
# (and not "NONE" from above)
RewriteCond ${vhost:%1} ^(/.*)$
#
# 5. finally we can map the URL to its docroot location
# and remember the virtual host for logging purposes
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ %1/$1 [E=VHOST:${lowercase:%{HTTP_HOST}}]
:
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="proxy-deny" id="proxy-deny">Proxy Deny</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>How can we forbid a certain host or even a user of a
special host from using the Apache proxy?</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>We first have to make sure <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a></code>
is below(!) <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_proxy.html">mod_proxy</a></code> in the Configuration
file when compiling the Apache web server. This way it gets
called <em>before</em> <code class="module"><a href="/mod/mod_proxy.html">mod_proxy</a></code>. Then we
configure the following for a host-dependent deny...</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_HOST} <strong>^badhost\.mydomain\.com$</strong>
RewriteRule !^http://[^/.]\.mydomain.com.* - [F]
</pre></div>
<p>...and this one for a user@host-dependent deny:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_IDENT}@%{REMOTE_HOST} <strong>^badguy@badhost\.mydomain\.com$</strong>
RewriteRule !^http://[^/.]\.mydomain.com.* - [F]
</pre></div>
</dd>
</dl>
</div><div class="top"><a href="#page-header"><img alt="top" src="/images/up.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="section">
<h2><a name="referer-deflector" id="referer-deflector">Referer-based Deflector</a></h2>
<dl>
<dt>Description:</dt>
<dd>
<p>How can we program a flexible URL Deflector which acts
on the "Referer" HTTP header and can be configured with as
many referring pages as we like?</p>
</dd>
<dt>Solution:</dt>
<dd>
<p>Use the following really tricky ruleset...</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
RewriteMap deflector txt:/path/to/deflector.map
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !=""
RewriteCond ${deflector:%{HTTP_REFERER}} ^-$
RewriteRule ^.* %{HTTP_REFERER} [R,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !=""
RewriteCond ${deflector:%{HTTP_REFERER}|NOT-FOUND} !=NOT-FOUND
RewriteRule ^.* ${deflector:%{HTTP_REFERER}} [R,L]
</pre></div>
<p>... in conjunction with a corresponding rewrite
map:</p>
<div class="example"><pre>
##
## deflector.map
##
http://www.badguys.com/bad/index.html -
http://www.badguys.com/bad/index2.html -
http://www.badguys.com/bad/index3.html http://somewhere.com/
</pre></div>
<p>This automatically redirects the request back to the
referring page (when "<code>-</code>" is used as the value
in the map) or to a specific URL (when an URL is specified
in the map as the second argument).</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div></div>
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