Dynamic URL Rewriting at the edge with Cloudflare


URLs are ugly. They are hard to read, difficult to memorise and often auto-generated for the benefit of the origin server - not the user.
Today we are announcing the immediate availability of Transform Rules for all Cloudflare plans. Transform Rules provide Cloudflare administrators with the ability to create URL rewrite rules. These rules transform HTTP requests as they flow through Cloudflare providing an interpretation layer between the human friendly
and the computer friendly
.
Ease of understanding
Imagine you are going on a much needed around-the-world trip and want to buy a copy of John Graham-Cumming’s book The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive to use as inspiration. Would the link https://www.travelbooks247.com/dp/0596523203/ make sense to you? Chances are the answer is no. It's hard for humans to understand these complex, contextless URLs.
This is why companies instead provide user friendly alternatives such as: https://www.travelbooks247.com/Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/dp/0596523203/ and use web servers as the interpreter. This interpretation is known as URL rewriting.
Large ecommerce retailers take HTTP requests to these human-friendly URLs and rewrite them using a simple pattern that strips the content Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/
before sending the HTTP request to the backend. The human readable hyperlink Continue reading