How to configure nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target and spec.rules.http.paths.path to satisfy the following URI patterns

Question

How can I configure nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target and spec.rules.http.paths.path to satisfy the following URI patterns?

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Answer 1

The nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target annotation is used to indicate the target URI where the traffic must be redirected. As per how I understand your question, you only want to match the URI patterns that you specified without redirecting the traffic. In order to achieve this, you can set the nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex annotation to true, thus enabling regular expressions in the spec.rules.http.paths.path field.

Let's now take a look at the regex that you will need to match your URI patterns. First of all, the regex engine used by ingress-nginx doesn't support backreferences, therefore a regex like this one will not work. This is not a problem as you can match the /aa-bb/aa part without forcing the two aas to be equal since you will —presumably— still have to check the correctness of the URI later on in your service (e.g /us/en-us may be accepted whereas /ab/cd-ab may not).

You can use this regex to match the specified URI patterns:

/[a-z]{2}/[a-z]{2}-[a-z]{2}/coolapp(/.*)?

If you want to only match URL slugs in the cc part of the pattern you specified, you can use this regex instead:

/[a-z]{2}/[a-z]{2}-[a-z]{2}/coolapp(/[a-z0-9]+([a-z0-9]+)*)?

Lastly, as the nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex enforces case insensitive regex, using [A-Z] instead of [a-z] would lead to the same result.

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Follows an ingress example definition using the use-regex annotation:

apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: test-regex
  annotations:
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true"
spec:
  rules:
  - host: test.com
    http:
      paths:
      - path: /[a-z]{2}/[a-z]{2}-[a-z]{2}/coolapp(/.*)?
        backend:
          serviceName: test
          servicePort: 80

You can find more information about Ingress Path Matching in the official user guide.