Responce URI Masking/Hiding

Hi Gregg,

Why are you trying to hide the path? Is it for security purposes? Or some other reason?

1 isn't really possible. A normal session flow for HTTP would be a client makes a request to /. The web application sends back an HTML response with links in it. If the client clicks on a link, the browser address bar is updated to the new location and the browser makes a request to the web application with the new location set in the request line. You could create a one to one mapping of the URI a client requests to a backend URI, but you cannot say that you want to have the client make a request to /home but have an iRule dynamically rewrite the URI to different paths.

2 is possible to try, but it's easily bypassed. You could use an iRule to check if the path starts with /home and allow access to the pool and for all other requests, redirect the client. However, if a client made a request to /home/../other_directory/ it would pass the iRule logic and be processed as /other_directory/ by the web server.

 
 when HTTP_REQUEST { 
  
     Check if requested path doesn't start with /home 
    if {not ([HTTP::path] starts_with "/home")}{ 
  
        Redirect the client to /home 
       HTTP::redirect "http://[HTTP::host]/home" 
  
        OR 
  
        Respond with an access denied message 
       HTTP::respond 403 content {some html explaining the response} 
    } 
 } 
 

Aaron