How to route traffic (reverse Proxy) with HAProxy based on request body

Question

I am attempting to route the following request to the appropriate servers based on the URL identified in the POST body below. I am hoping to accomplish this via a reverse proxy using HAProxy.

E.g. I would like to direct all requests to HAProxy, than have HAProxy check if certain values exist in the POST body (E.g. the notification url value "pingpong"), and if this is the case, route the traffic to an endopint I will specify in the configs.

POST /someURL/file.jsp HTTP/1.1
Host: 10.43.90.190:80
Content-Type: application/json
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 256

{"Info": {"groupName":"thisgroup1","Id":"M1234R456","id2":"TUP1234",
    "countryCode":"USA","carrierCode":"USAIC","e164Address":"123456768789",
    "notificationURL":"http:\/\/www.pingpong.com\/notify",
    "timestamp":"2014-03-04T17:33:30.000Z"}}

Is there any way to use an acl to search for the content, "pingpong" in the request body, and based on this value, I would route it appropriately?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This can be done using a simple Access Control List (ACL). However, This wasn't possible up until Haproxy 1.6 (October 2015), where you can include this option in your frontend:

option http-buffer-request

This option gives Haproxy access to the body. Then you can use req.body to access the body. Example:

frontend http-in
             bind *:80
             option http-buffer-request
             acl redirect_pingpong req.body -m reg [insert your regular expression here]
             use_backend pingpong_backend if redirect_pingpong

             default_backend web_bk

And then go on to define your backends.

Further information on accessing body content can be found here and information about ACLs can be found here.