How to redirect to Tomcat depending on _escaped_fragment_ in the URL?

Question

As part of trying to make an AJAX site crawlable, I wish to redirect URLs containing "_escaped_fragment_" to Tomcat.

I currently make Apache serve the root resource "/" but if the resource "/?_escaped_fragment_=" is requested then it should redirect the request to Tomcat so that the crawler servlet can service it.

It seems to me that you can not do that in mod_jk.conf

Answer 1

You could use an Apache rewrite rule to transform the URL in a format that will be easier to forward to Tomcat using mod_jk:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^(_escaped_fragment_=.*)
RewriteRule ^/$ /crawler/?%1 [L,R=permanent]

The above rule would only apply when the query string starts with _escaped_fragment_= and it will transform this URL:

http://host/?_escaped_fragment_=home

Into this one:

http://host/crawler/?_escaped_fragment_=home

You can then use the usual JkMount directive to forward /crawler to Tomcat, e.g.:

JkMount /crawler* ajp13_worker