URLRewrite Archives - Page 2 of 2

10 URL Rewriting Tips and Tricks

This post describes some of the tips and tricks that one may find useful when solving URL-based problems for their web server or web site. Each tip/trick has a description of a problem and then an example of how it can be solved with IIS 7 URL Rewrite Module.

1. Add or Remove Trailing Slash

Many web applications use “virtual URLs” – that is the URLs that do not directly map to the file and directory layout on web server’s file system. An example of such application may be an ASP.NET MVC application with URL format similar to this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/60857/modrewrite-equivalent-for-iis-7-0 or a PHP application with URL format that looks like this: http://ruslany.net/2008/11/url-rewrite-module-release-to-web/. If you try to request these URLs with or without trailing slash you will still get the same page. That is OK for human visitors, but may be a problem for search engine crawlers as well as for web analytics services. Different URLs for the same page may cause crawlers to treat the same page as different pages, thus affecting the page ranking. They will also cause Web Analytics statistics for this page to be split up.

URL Rewrite Module – Release to Web

Today IIS team has made the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 Release To Web (RTW) available for download. This is a final, production-ready release that is officially supported by Microsoft.

Install the URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 RTW today!

Upgrade from Go Live release

If you already have Go Live release of URL Rewrite module installed then the installation package will upgrade it to RTW release. All rewrite rules in applicationHost.config and web.config files will be preserved. Note that system reboot may be necessary when upgrading from Go Live to RTW release.

ASP.NET update

The installer for URL Rewrite module includes an update for ASP.NET runtime. The update has fixes for bugs specific to URL rewriting. The update is applied only if the machine where URL Rewrite module is being installed has .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1 or higher. If required version of .NET Framework is installed after URL Rewrite module has been installed, then the ASP.NET update can be applied by re-running URL Rewrite module installer in repair mode.

Video walkthrough for URL Rewrite Module

Last week I have recorded a video screencast that shows how to use URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 to perform some common URL manipulations tasks. Today this video has been published on IIS.NET – check it out at this location.

The video demonstrates how to create rewrite rules to perform the following tasks:

Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URLs for dynamic web pages;
Enforcing canonical host names, so that site visitors as well as search engines always use a particular domain name for your web site;
Using rewrite maps to define static mappings between requested and rewritten URLs;
Blocking unwanted site crawlers by aborting requests based on HTTP user-agent header.

In addition, the video shows how to test, troubleshoot and debug rewrite rules by using “Test pattern” tool and IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing.

Please take a look and leave comments or questions if anything is not clear or you would like to get more information on a particular topic.

URL Rewrite Module – Go Live release

Today IIS team has made the Go Live release of URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 available for download. This release contains significant functionality and performance improvements and it is believed to have a quality level suitable for production deployments.

Download the Go Live release of the module today!

Note that the installer for URL Rewrite Module includes the FastCGI update for IIS 7.0. If this update has not been yet installed on your machine it will be installed together with URL Rewrite Module.

ASP.NET Routing, Request Filtering, URL Rewriting

Today I have published two new articles on http://learn.iis.net. The articles are intended to explain the differences between various URL manipulation technologies available in IIS 7.0 and to provide help with choosing of the technology best suited for a particular usage scenario.

Here is the short summary of the articles:

IIS 7.0 URL Rewriting and ASP.NET Routing – with the release of URL-rewrite module for IIS 7.0 and the inclusion of ASP.NET routing into the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, there have been a lot of questions from ASP.NET developers about how these two features relate to each other and when to use each. This article describes the differences between these two technologies and provides guidance for Web developers on when to use IIS URL rewriting and when to use ASP.NET routing.
IIS 7.0 Request Filtering and URL Rewriting – IIS 7.0 includes a request filtering module that is based on the URLScan ISAPI Filter for IIS 6.0. The module helps you tighten security of your Web servers. The URL rewrite module, even though its primary purpose is to rewrite URL paths for requests, can also be used as a security enforcement tool that helps prevent access to Web site content. The article compares security related features of these two modules and explains how to choose among them when securing your web server.

Please take a look and leave comments or questions if anything is not clear or you would like to get more information on a particular topic.

Acknowledgements: I want to thank Phil Haack from ASP.NET team and Nazim Lala from IIS team for reviewing the articles and providing great feedback. Also I thank Mike Pope for very high quality editing of the articles.

Scripting URL rewrite module configuration

URL rewrite module fully utilizes extensibility of IIS 7.0 configuration system. The rewrite rules are stored in applicationHost.config and web.config files in XML format. This provides a huge benefit of being able to use rich set of IIS 7.0 management tools and API’s for managing and scripting URL rewriter configuration. For example, you can automate any configuration task, including creating, editing and deleting of rewrite rules, by:

writing .NET code that uses Microsoft.Web.Administration API’s;
writing JavaScript code;
using IIS command line tool appcmd.exe;
using PowerShell provider.

The Configuration Editor, included in the Administration Pack for IIS 7.0, greatly simplifies the process of generating scripts for automating URL rewriter configuration. In this post, I will demonstrate how to use the Configuration Editor to automate configuration of rewrite rules.

IIS.NET uses URL rewrite module

IIS.NET team has been very proactive in helping us out with testing of URL rewrite module. In fact, they even agreed to deploy the latest build of the module on the production server that hosts http://www.iis.net. This kind of real-life deployments really helps us validate the features and functionality of the module. And being able to do this validation so early in release cycle gives us a good opportunity to adjust the feature set, re-consider some of the design decisions, or just find some very good bugs.

IIS.NET has URL rewriting requirements, which are typical for large content management systems. The articles on the site are often moved or updated and the old links should continue to work. Or there is a need to have a nice URL (for example – http://www.iis.net/fastcgi) for a page that currently has some meaningless URL (e.g. http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1521). IIS.NET has more than a hundred of such URL mappings. Majority of those mappings are static, so there is no need to use regular expression patterns, capture groups, back-references or any other advanced URL rewriting stuff. Rewriting logic is very simple:- for example if input URL is “/php” then rewrite it to “/default.aspx?tabid=50001”. But if we tried to define this logic by creating a rewrite rule per URL mapping we would end up with more than a hundred of rules, which would be evaluated for every request. That would kill the performance of the web site.