How to forward requests received with a specific Header OR from a specific IP address with a LAMP stack

Question

We have a Symfony2 application which is in heavy development and have just signed our first production client.

We want to temporarily put this client on another cluster that is stable while we continue heavy development on our current cluster. We want this whole situation to remain invisible to the client however.

So, I'd like to selectively forward requests from this client's machine using their specific request header authorization (preferred) or their IP address (if header isn't possible) from our primary www webserver to the webserver of our stable cluster.

I'm looking at mod_proxy, would this be the best tool to achieve this? Anything else? I can do it in the application if necessary but this would add a bit of unwanted overhead to each request. We're set up on AWS if that provides any additional tools that I'm unaware of.

Thanks a bunch!

Answer 1

Since you want to do the forward selectively, you need both mod_proxy and mod_rewrite, as mod_proxy by itself would only proxy by the URL context

You could either proxy based on remote IP:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^12.34.56.78$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  http://cluster/$1  [P]

or based on login (asuming basic authentication):

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_USER} ^username$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  http://cluster/$1  [P]

There is also the %{HTTP:header_name} in case it is a custom header:

RewriteCond %{HTTP:my_custom_header_name} ^my_custom_header_value$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  http://cluster/$1  [P]