How to setup request proxy using URL rewriting - apache

I have an e-commerce site that resides in:
http://dev.gworks.mobi/
When a customer clicks on the signin link, the browser gets redirected to another domain, in order for authentication:
http://frock.gworks.mobi:8080/openam/XUI/#login/&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fdev.gworks.mobi%3A80%2Fcustomer%2Faccount%2Flogin%2Freferer%2FaHR0cDovL2Rldi5nd29ya3MubW9iaS8%2C%2F
I'm trying to rewrite http://dev.gworks.mobi/* to http://frock.gworks.mobi:8080/openam/*, without redirection.
I've tried this in the .htaccess of the dev.gworks.mobi site:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/openam(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://frock.gworks.mobi:8080/$1 [P,L]
</IfModule>
But when I access http://dev.gworks.mobi/openam, it shows a 404 page not found page.
Can anyone help me to achieve my use case?

Try this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
# Make sure it's not an actual file being accessed
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Match the host
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^dev\.gworks\.mobi
# Rewrite the request if it starts with "openam"
RewriteRule ^openam(.*)$ http://frock.gworks.mobi:8080/$1 [L,QSA]
This will rewrite all the requests to dev.gworks.mobi/openam to frock.gworks.mobi:8080.
If you want to mask the URI in a way that it's not visible to the visitor that she's visiting the authentication app, you need to add a P flag. Please note that it needs Apache's mod_proxy module in place:
RewriteRule ^openam(.*)$ http://frock.gworks.mobi:8080/$1 [P,L,QSA]
Feel free to drop the L flag, if it's not the last rewrite rule. See RewriteRule Flags for more information.
The 404
If it's all in place and you're still getting a 404 error, make sure that the target URL is not throwing 404 errors in the first place.
Second, check if you're still getting the error with the correct referrer URI set. It might be designed in a way to throw a 404, if the referrer is not correctly set. If that's the case, which I suspect, you need to use the R flag and redirect instead of proxying the request.
Last thing that comes to my mind, some webapps are not built in a way to figure out the URI address. The host, as well as the port number, might be hard-coded somewhere in the config files. Make sure that the authentication app is able to be run from another URL without the need to edit the configs.
Test
You can test the rewriterule online:

Related

.htaccess rewrite returning Error 404

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)public_url=([^&]+)($|&)
RewriteRule ^process\.php$ /api/%2/? [L,R=301]
Where domain.tld/app/process.php?public_url=abcd1234 is the actual location of the script.
But I am trying to get .htaccess to make the URL like this: domain.tld/app/api/acbd1234.
Essentially hides the process.php script and the get query ?public_url.
However the script above is returning error 404 not found.
I think this is what you are actually looking for:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (?:^|&)public_url=([^&]+)(?:$|&)
RewriteRule ^/?app/process\.php$ /app/api/%1 [R=301,QSD]
RewriteRule ^/?app/api/([^/]+)/?$ /app/process.php?public_url=$1 [END]
If you receive an internal server error (http status 500) for that then check your http servers error log file. Chances are that you operate a very old version of the apache http server, you may have to replace the [END] flag with the [L] flag which probably will work just fine in this scenario.
And a general hint: you should always prefer to place such rules inside the http servers (virtual) host configuration instead of using dynamic configuration files (.htaccess style files). Those files are notoriously error prone, hard to debug and they really slow down the server. They are only supported as a last option for situations where you do not have control over the host configuration (read: really cheap hosting service providers) or if you have an application that relies on writing its own rewrite rules (which is an obvious security nightmare).
UPDATE:
Based on your many questions in the comments below (we see again how important it is to be precise in the question itself ;-) ) I add this variant implementing a different handling of path components:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (?:^|&)public_url=([^&]+)(?:$|&)
RewriteRule ^/?app/process\.php$ /api/%1 [R=301,QSD]
RewriteRule ^/?api/([^/]+)/?$ /app/process.php?public_url=$1 [END]
I am trying to get .htaccess to make the URL like this: example.com/app/api/acbd1234.
You don't do this in .htaccess. You change the URL in your application and then rewrite the new URL to the actual/old URL. (You only need to redirect this, if the old URLs have been indexed by search engines - but you need to watch for redirect loops.)
So, change the URL in your application to /app/api/acbd1234 and then rewrite this in .htaccess (which I assume in in your /app subdirectory). For example:
RewriteEngine On
# Rewrite new URL back to old
RewriteRule ^api/([^/]+)$ process.php?public_url=$1 [L]
You included a trailing slash in your earlier directive, but you omitted this in your example URL, so I've omitted it here also.
If you then need to also redirect the old URL for the sake of SEO, then you can implement a redirect before the internal rewrite:
RewriteEngine On
# Redirect old URL to new (if request by search engines or external links)
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (?:^|&)public_url=([^&]+)(?:$|&)
RewriteRule ^process\.php$ /app/api/%1? [R=302,L]
# Rewrite new URL back to old
RewriteRule ^api/([^/]+)$ process.php?public_url=$1 [L]
The check against REDIRECT_STATUS is to avoid a rewrite loop. ?: inside the parenthesised subpattern avoids the group being captured as a backreference.
Change the 302 (temporary) to 301 (permanent) only when you are sure it's working OK, to avoid erroneous redirects being cached by the browser.

Problems redirecting from a 403 using .htaccess (Yourls)

I'm using a php app called Yourls. It's a self-hosted url shortener and it's pretty great, I'm happy with its overall functionality. Due to the nature of its development however there isn't much in the way of support. Let's pretend the base url is af.to, where a shortened url would be af.to/goo that might redirect to whatever url is defined by 'goo'. The problem I'm facing is that if someone goes to af.to, they end up on a 403-Forbidden. I'd rather the client is redirected to a specific url instead. I have already picked up a plugin for Yourls which redirects to a url when a shortlink is not found or mis-typed, but this does not cover the base of af.to
I attempted to put in a 403 redirect in the .htaccess, but that broke the whole yourls script resulting in a 500 server error.
Current .htaccess looks like this:
# BEGIN YOURLS
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^.*$ /yourls-loader.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END YOURLS
Any help on what I need to do?
Thank you.
The RewriteCond blocks tell the RewriteRule to skip existing files / folders. When you go to http://af.to/, the root folder exists : no redirection. The apache server doesn't find any index.html (or index.php) file, isn't allowed to list the content of the folder, give up and returns a 403 Forbidden.
You can create the index.html file to show some content or you can add these lines to redirect to an other url :
# just after RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/$ http://my-compagny.com/ [L,R=301]

Page-alias without .html-suffix

One TYPO3 installation I have here uses the field alias in the page settings. It does not make use of simulatestatic or realurl. If the alias of a page is to foo, this page is reachable under the following URLs:
/index.php?id=foo
/foo.html
I now want the page to be reachable under an additional URL: /foo, without the .html.
My approach was to simply use mod_rewrite add some rules like this:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !index.php$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.html$
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
My RewriteRules work, they rewrite the URI /foo first to /foo.html and later to /index.php. This does not work, I get a 404 when requesting /foo.
I assume this happens since TYPO3 still gets the info that the original URI was /foo instead of /foo.html, which it doesn't recognize.
How could this be solved, without using realurl or simulatestatic (the side-effects are unwanted), and without using a HTTP redirect (the URL in the browser should be /foo)? Is there something like a server-internal redirect in apache?
If mod_proxy is activated on your server, you could use the proxy flag [P] and write:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.html$
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)$ /$1.html [QSA,P]
If not, you could write a php file that acts as a proxy (I've done that before for Typo3). cURL oder even a simple file_get_contents() is very handy in this case. Make sure to only load pages from your domain. Redirect your non-.html files to the proxy file that redirects them to the .html-file which is then processed by Typo3.

problems getting mod_rewrite working

I've not done much with mod_rewrite, but I can't seem to get anywhere with this. I'm wondering if perhaps it is not enabled on my server(even though my host says it is).
I have the following url: http://dev.website.com/folder1/translate/horse and I want that to redirect to: http://dev.website.com/folder1/translate.php?word=horse
My .htaccess starts with RewriteEngine on and I've tried various attempts to get it working, but no matter what, it just shows my home page (the default 404 redirect).
Things I've tried:
RewriteRule ^translate/.*$ translate.php?word=$1
RewriteRule ^translate translate.php
and some other things I don't remember, but I can't get anything to work.
The .htaccess file I am using is located in folder1. I have also tried putting random characters in the file to make it throw an error, and it does.
Anything I'm missing? How would I properly create this redirect?
As per request, this is my file structure.
I have the domain www.website.com, and a subdomain dev.website.com. The subdomain is set so that it redirects to www.website.com/dev. So, in this case, dev.website.com/folder1/translate.php = www.website.com/dev/folder1/translate.php. I am not sure how that masking is done, as it is accomplished via my web host's cpanel.
You aren't capturing $1 in brackets so this should work:
In DOCUMENT_ROOT/.htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^folder1/translate/(.*)$ /folder1/translate.php?word=$1 [L,QSA]
In DOCUMENT_ROOT/folder1/.htaccess:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /folder1/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^translate/(.*)$ translate.php?word=$1 [L,QSA]

PHP URL Rewriting

I am setting up some rewrite rules on an Apache server using mod_rewrite. I was wondering if it was possible to write a rule that will basically re-direct the user to the home page if the page is not found i.e.
http://example.com/test <-- does not exist
However, I would like if the user was to navigate to this domain they are automatically re-directed to:
http://example.com/
With this in mind, I don't want the URL to still display "http://example.com/test" I would like the URL to update itself to become "http://example.com/".
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ http://domain.com/ [L,R=301]
Essentially, "if the requested filename is not a file or directory, redirect".
I wouldn’t use a HTTP redirection but instead send an error document together with the proper error status code.