URL Rewrite

URL Rewrite is the process of altering the parameters in a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The URL rewrite module is an extension to IIS which is available as a download for your stand-alone IIS Server. URL Rewrites can be managed at the server level or for individual sites as required.

Patterns are used through the URL Rewrite module. These are in one of three modes:

• Exact Match
• Wildcards - where an asterisk is used to mean "anything here" and is captured when matched
• ECMAScript regular expressions, which are Perl compatible regular expressions

Rules are two types as below:

• Inbound rules - looks at the request URLs and change them
• Outbound rules - inspects the traffic sent out, look for URLs within it, and rewrite them as needed. This is very handy when the content may use an absolute URL that is not what the user should be receiving (especially handy in reverse proxy scenarios)

Built in Rules URL rewrite supports various built in rules as below:

• Rule with rewrite map: allows you to define a set of paths and their replacements as a simple list
• Request blocking: disallow access to a path
• User-friendly URL: quickly creates rules to map path segments (separated by slashes) to query strings
• Reverse Proxy: allows the current server to reverse proxy another
• Enforce lowercase URLs: makes the client always use lowercase URLs via an HTTP status 301 ("Permanent") redirect
• Canonical domain name: uses an HTTP status 301 ("Permanent") redirect to ensure that clients always use the specified domain name
• Append or remove the trailing slash symbol: will either always add or always remove the trailing slash in an URL path using an HTTP status 301 ("Permanent") redirect