20 Lines or Less #64: VIP to VIP redirection, URL separation and Redirect Rewriting

What could you do with your code in 20 Lines or Less? That's the question I like to ask for the DevCentral community, and every time I go looking to find cool new examples that show just how flexible and powerful iRules can be without getting in over your head. If there's one thing I learned on the road recently, traipsing around to some awesome user groups, it's that there's nearly no end to the uses for iRules in the real world. I've seen things ranging from the simplest redirect rules all the way up to some pretty gnarly complexity implementations, and everything in between. It's awesome to see iRules of many incarnations doing their thing, and it continues to remind me just how many ways people are using this technology in a myriad of ways.

To that end this week brings another set of iRules examples showcasing a few more ways in which the community is putting iRules to work. Thanks to the wicked community doing that thing that you all do, we've got Virtual to Virtual redirection, rewriting mid redirection, as well as separation of URL/URI content. Not only that, but this week examples in less than 20 lines wasn't enough of a challenge. Instead I'm delivering 3 examples in less than 10 lines of code each. It's the super minified version of the 20LoL, for those efficiency minded folks. Let's dig in:

 

Using an iRule to redirect traffic to different Virtual Servers

Using an iRule to redirect traffic to different Virtual Servers
iRules and redirection is a match that has been made time and time again for years. A new twist on this ability, however, came about with the capability for iRules to direct traffic from one Virtual Server to another. This is often referred to as VIP targeting VIP. This can be useful for many reasons, not the least of which is toggling profiles based on request info which is something I've had a bit of experience with lately for some Web Accelerator testing…but more about that later. User wbbigdave posed this question about directing traffic from on VS to another to create the ultimate VIP to rule them all. Fortunately for his VIP ruling needs this is completely possible, and Richard gave a simple example of how.

 

 

Yet another redirect question

Yet another redirect question
User drizzle is looking for a way to do some URI rewriting of a URI in the midst of a redirection. The situation is that they need to respond to a user with the requested URI modified to replace a given portion of the URI with a separate string. This is easy to do in an iRule, of course, and Michael Yates was kind enough to provide a great example of exactly how this works.

 

Looking to separate URL from URI

Looking to separate out URL from URI
In this final example user Snowman (yeah…awesome name, right?) was looking for a way to split up and examine different portions of an HTTP URI. There are a few options to go about this depending on whether or not you want to inspect the query string or just the HTTP path, etc. After a bit of tweaking it seems that they were able to come up with a solution that worked for them using linden and split to effectively tokenize the HTTP::path variable, and then make decisions based on that list. Very handy stuff to keep around as this is broadly useful logic.