Testing mod_rewrite on internal LAN

[Michael Daly]

I have two virtual hosts on a single Apache 2.2 web server. I also have two machines as:

1 - Production. 192.168.123.1 - firewall routes real traffic to this one with domain names e.g. realdomain.foo/bunch/of/stuff. I can't touch this server.

2 - Test. 192.168.123.2 - I test on this.

The test machine gets web accesses in the form of 192.168.123.2/bunch/of/stuff. Since I need to do rewrite processing on the [HTTP_HOST], I'm not getting the domain, just the IP.

How do I spoof the test server so that the rewrite can be tested with realdomain.foo/bunch/of/stuff instead of 192.168.123.2/bunch/of/stuff?

[richardk]

If you're inside the LAN, then you could make a record in your hosts file to send requests to realdomain.foo to 192.168.123.2.

Other than that i don't think you can. Mod_rewrite can't change what the router/firewall does; it can only work once the request gets to the server.

[Michael Daly]

I figured out a solution that seems to work (so far). In the virtual host rewriting section, I start with:

# Do nothing rewrite rule that sets the environment variable.
RewriteRule .* - [E=USE_HOST:realdomain.foo]

... bunch of stuff ...

RewriteCond %{ENV:USE_HOST} ^realdomain\.foo$ [NC]

This lets me use the faked host instead of the IP for testing on the LAN. When I want to do final test (and move code to production) in a production level environment, I change the first rewriterule to:

RewriteRule .* - [E=USE_HOST:%{HTTP_HOST}]

Now I have the same code with the host as it comes in from the 'net without touching the rest of the code (and inadvertently breaking it).

Not perfect, but acceptable for now.

[Michael Daly]

And a better solution still is to edit the "hosts" file (\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts - no extension) and put the domain in with the LAN address.

Windows uses HOSTS as a kind of DNS cache. Just make sure you remove the entry from hosts when you're done or you'll never get the real IP.