Create AWS Application Load Balancer Rule which trim off request's prefix without using additional reverse proxy like nginx, httpd

Question

Basically, I have a couple of services. I want to forward every requests with prefix "/secured" to server1 port 80 and all other requests to server 2 port 80. The problem is that on server1, I am running service which accept the request without "/secured" prefix. In other words, I want to forward every requests such as "http://example.com/secured/api/getUser" to server1 as "http://example.com/api/getUser" (remove /secured from request' path).

With AWS ALB, currently the request is sent as http://example.com/secured/api/getUser; which forces me to update my server1's code so that the code handles requests with /secured prefix which doesn't look good.

Is there any easy way to solve this with ALB?

Thanks.

Ochs

The ALB isn't sophisticated enough to do this. You will have to use a reverse proxy for this. – Safford

Answer 1

I can confirm that this is unfortunately not possible with the ALB alone - and I agree it really should be.

AWS states:

Note that the path pattern is used to route requests but does not alter them. For example, if a rule has a path pattern of /img/*, the rule would forward a request for /img/picture.jpg to the specified target group as a request for /img/picture.jpg.

Infliction

Things have moved on, this is a 5 year old question - you can do this through Route53 now - if you're a programmer you will need DevOps support though – Infliction

Mr @kong, how can we achieve this using route53 ? – Twotone

For anyone who stumbles upon this, I believe this is probably what @kong was referring to #53157927 – Ramonaramonda

Answer 2

I had the same issue, and as Mark pointed out, you can use reverse proxy on your server and do something like this (this is Nginx configuration):

server {
  listen 80 default_server;

  location /secured/ {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:{service_port}/;
  }
}

This will strip the /secured part and proxy everything else to your service. Just be sure to have the trailing / after the service port.

Naphthyl