How do I redirect a specific URL/ROUTE/PATH/LOCATION to another?

Question

Say my client (current device) wants to connect to a URL, say foo.bar.com/spam/eggs/123, how do I serve or redirect to another specified URL, say 127.0.0.1:8080, and prevent the client from reaching foo.bar.com/spam/eggs/123?

What software can I use?

Answer 1

If I understand your setup, you have some external domain, example.com, controlled by a 3rd party, with a website running on it, controlled by someone else. You want to allow access to that site generally, but block certain URLs.

There are a few solutions to this; they all boil down to some sort of proxy server. You would proxy web traffic via this proxy server and have a block/redirect list configured in it, which would deal with predefined exceptions.

One free solution is squid caching proxy, which does have redirectors support (here are details in the documentation - https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/Redirectors). Do note though that it's very much not trivial to set this up correctly and maintain it. No disrespect, but based on the fact that you had to ask this question, I suspect you may struggle to do this successfully.

Answer 2

You should use a reverse proxy like Nginx first install it sudo apt-get install nginx then go to the configuration file at /etc/nginx/sites-available/foo.bar.conf and put this inside:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name foo.bar.com;

    location /spam/eggs/123 {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }
}

then enable it with ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/foo.bar.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

With this configuration, when a client tries to connect to foo.bar.com/spam/eggs/123, Nginx will redirect the request to http://127.0.0.1:8080

then reload Nginx sudo systemctl reload nginx