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9.9.5.1 The rewrite statement

The Rewrite block statement associates one or more header modification directives discussed above with request matching directives, so that request modification takes place only when the request matches certain conditions.

Syntactically, a Rewrite section is:

  Rewrite [ request ]
    conditional_directivesmodification_directives…
[ Else
    conditional_directivesmodification_directives… ]
  End

where conditional_directives represents one or more request conditionals described below and modification_directives stands for one or more header modification directives. The Else part is optional; any number of Else blocks can be supplied, thus providing for conditional branching.

The Rewrite statement is processed sequentially until a branch is found whose conditional_directives yield ‘true’, or End is encountered. If a matching branch is found, its modification_directives are applied to the request.

Request matching directives or request conditionals are special statements that, being applied to a HTTP request, yield ‘true’ or ‘false’ depending on whether the request satisfies the condition described in the directive. The following conditionals are available:

Request Conditional: ACL "name"

Returns ‘true’ if the source IP matches one of the CIDRs from the named access control list name. The ACL itself must have been defined earlier (see ACL definition).

See ACL, for a detailed discussion.

Request Conditional: ACL

This statement defines an unnamed ACL to match the source IP against. This line must be followed by one or more lines defining CIDRs, as described in ACL definition. The ACL definition is finished with an End keyword on a line by itself.

Semantically, this statement is equivalent to the named ACL reference described above.

See ACL, for a detailed discussion.

Request Conditional: BasicAuth "filename"

Evaluates to ‘true’, if the incoming request passes basic authorization as described in RFC 7617. Filename is the name of a plain text file containing usernames and passwords, created with htpasswd or similar utility. Unless the name starts with a slash, it is taken relative to the IncludeDir directory (see include directory). The file is cached in the memory on the first authorization attempt, so that further authorizations do not result in disk operations. The file will be re-scanned if pound notices that its modification time has changed.

See Authentication.

Request Conditional: Header [options] "pattern"

Yields ‘true’, if the request contains at least one header matching the given pattern. By default, pattern is treated as case-insensitive POSIX extended regular expression. This can be changed by options, described below.

Request Conditional: Host [options] "hostname"

Evaluates to ‘true’, if the Host header matches hostname. In the absence of options, case-insensitive exact match is assumed, i.e. this construct is equivalent to

Header "Host:[[:space:]]*qhost"

where qhost is the hostname argument in quoted form, i.e. with all characters that have special meaning in regular expressions escaped.

See Table 9.2, for a detailed discussion of options and their effect on matching.

This statement is provided to facilitate handling of virtual hosts. See Service selection, for details.

Request Conditional: Path [options] "pattern"

Returns ‘true’, if the path part of the incoming request matches pattern.

Request Conditional: Query [options] "pattern"

Returns ‘true’, if the query part of the incoming request matches pattern. The argument must be properly percent-encoded, if it contains whitespace or other non-printable characters.

Request Conditional: QueryParam "name" [options] "pattern"

Returns ‘true’, if the value of the query parameter name matches pattern.

See Table 9.2, for a detailed discussion of options and their effect on matching.

Request Conditional: StringMatch "string" [options] "pattern"

Expands string as described in String Expansions and matches the resulting value against pattern.

Request Conditional: URL [options] "pattern"

Matches URL of the request. Pattern is treated as case-sensitive extended regular expression, unless instructed otherwise by options (see below).

In these directives, options is a whitespace-delimited list of zero or more flags from the following table:

FlagMeaning
-begExact match at the beginning of string (prefix match).
-caseCase-sensitive comparison.
-containMatch if pattern is a substring of the original value.
-endExact match at the end of string (suffix match).
-exactUse exact string match.
-fileTreat pattern as the name of a file to read patterns from. If the name is relative, it will be looked up in the include directory. Patterns are read from the file line by line. Leading and trailing whitespace is removed. Empty lines and comments (lines starting with #) are ignored.
-icaseCase-insensitive comparison.
-pcreUse Perl-compatible regular expression. see Regular Expressions.
-perlSame as -pcre.
-posixUse POSIX extended regular expression. see Regular Expressions.
-reUse regular expression match. This assumes the default regular expression type, as set by the RegexType directive (see Regular Expressions).

Table 9.2: Conditional directive flags

The following options are mutually exclusive: -beg, -contain, -end, -exact, -pcre (-perl), -posix, -re. If more than one of these are used, the last one takes effect.

Placing the keyword Not before a header matching directive reverts its meaning. For example, the following will match any request whose URL does not begin with /static/:

Not URL -beg "/static/"

The Match block statement can be used to join multiple header matching directives. Its syntax is:

Match op
  …
End

where … stands for any number of matching directives, and op is a boolean operation: AND or OR (case-insensitive). For example, the statement

Match OR
  Host "www.example.net"
  Path -beg "/ssl"
End

will match if the request Host header has the value ‘www.example.net’, or the path part of its URL starts with ‘/ssl’. In contrast, the statement below:

Match AND
  Host "www.example.net"
  Path -beg "/ssl"
End

will match only if both these conditions are met. As a syntactical short-cut, two or more matching statements appearing outside of Match are joined by an implicit logical AND, so that the latter example is equivalent to:

Host "www.example.net"
Path -beg "/ssl"

The Match statement, like any other matching directive, can be prefixed with Not, which reverts its meaning.


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