Can HAProxy be used to rewrite for pretty URLs?

Question

Can HAProxy rewrite a URI from "domain.com/cool/url" to "domain.com/index.php/cool/url" as it passes a request to the Web server?

Thanks.

Answer 1

reqrep  <search> <string>
reqirep <search> <string>   (ignore case)
  Replace a regular expression with a string in an HTTP request line
  May be used in sections :   defaults | frontend | listen | backend
                                 no    |    yes   |   yes  |   yes
  Arguments :
    <search>  is the regular expression applied to HTTP headers and to the
              request line. This is an extended regular expression. Parenthesis
              grouping is supported and no preliminary backslash is required.
              Any space or known delimiter must be escaped using a backslash
              ('\'). The pattern applies to a full line at a time. The "reqrep"
              keyword strictly matches case while "reqirep" ignores case.

    <string>  is the complete line to be added. Any space or known delimiter
              must be escaped using a backslash ('\'). References to matched
              pattern groups are possible using the common \N form, with N
              being a single digit between 0 and 9. Please refer to section
              6 about HTTP header manipulation for more information.

HAProxy 1.3 Documentation

---

Edit: It is (obviously) up to you whether or not you choose to implement a rewrite using HAProxy, however, I would strongly suggest that you consider using mod_rewrite (or similar) instead.

HAProxy's rewrite functionality is intended to facilitate load-balancing activities and, from a maintenance perspective, webserver behavior should not be coupled to a load-balancer configuration - i.e. if the load-balancer were to be removed from your hosting configuration a single webserver should respond with the same content (and not 404 errors) for a request to a given URI.