IIS has been supporting reverse proxy configuration since URL Rewrite and Application Request Routing modules were released a few years ago. It is possible to configure an IIS hosted web site to act as a reverse proxy and forward web request to other URL’s based on the incoming request URL path. This is described in details in Reverse Proxy with URL Rewrite v2 and Application Request Routing.
Not too many people know however that the same kind of configuration can be achieved with a web site hosted in Azure Web Sites. This blog post explains the configurations steps to enable that.
For example if I want to forward all the requests that come to https://ruslany.net/proxy/ to some other URL I’ll need to do two things:
- Enable proxy functionality in ARR
- Add a proxy rewrite rule
Any site hosted in Azure Web Sites has URL Rewrite and ARR enabled. However the proxy functionality is disabled by default in ARR. To enable that we will use the Azure Site Extension XDT transform which will modify the applicationHost.config file for our site and will enable proxy features.
Continue reading “Using Azure Web Site as a reverse proxy”