Custom redirect to Wordpress VCL

This example details how to redirect to another backend using an Edge Dictionary and VCL. You may have a separate Wordpress blog for all of your store’s blog entries, kept separate from your store. For this example, you are trying to check the first part of the incoming path and redirect the visitor to your Wordpress backend. You would create an Edge Dictionary called wordpress_urls with a list of paths to redirect traffic.

You must have the following information to complete this VCL code snippet:

• Create an Edge Dictionary in your environments
• Account access and URL to the Magento Admin for the Staging or Production environment

Create Wordpress Edge Dictionary

Edge Dictionaries create key-value pairs for running against your VCL snippet. For example, you may want to build a dictionary of URLs to redirect to a Wordpress backend. You may only want to create the edge dictionary in your Production environment. You can also create it in Staging for testing if needed.

1. Log in to the Magento Admin.
2. Navigate to Stores > Configuration > Advanced > System > Fastly Configuration.
3. Expand the Edge dictionaries section.
4. Click Add container. You need to create a container to hold up to 1,000 key-value pairs.
5. On the container, enter a Dictionary name. For this example, use the name wordpress_urls.
6. Select the checkbox for Activate after the change if you want to the dictionary after creating or editing the container.
7. Add key-value pairs in the new dictionary. For this example, enter the URLs for your blog that should be redirected to your Wordpress backend. Enter a value of 1.

For more information on using Edge Dictionaries with your VCL snippets, see Fastly’s Creating and using Edge Dictionaries and their example custom VCL snippets.

Create wordpress.json

For this example, you may only want to run it against the Production server. You can also add it to Staging for testing.

Create an wordpress.json file with the following JSON content:

{
  "name": "wordpress",
  "dynamic": "0",
  "type": "recv",
  "priority": "5",
  "content": "if ( req.url.path ~ \"^\\/?([^:\/\\s]+).*$\" ) { if ( table.lookup(wordpress_urls, re.group.1, \"NOTFOUND\") != \"NOTFOUND\" ) { set req.http.X-WP = \"1\"; } }"
}

Review the following values for the code to determine if you need to make changes:

• name: Name for the VCL snippet. For this example, we used the name wordpress.
• priority: Determines the order VCL snippets call. You want to set the priority to 5 to immediately run and check for URLs that should be redirected. This priority runs the snippet immediately and before any of the uploaded and default Magento VCL snippets (magentomodule) that have a priority of 50.
• type: For this VCL, we use recv, which places it in the vcl_recv subroutine by below the boilerplate VCL and above any objects.
• content: The code that runs. The code extracts the first part mypath of the path /mypath/someotherpath. It then compares that path against the Edge Dictionary wordpress_urls. If a match is found, the visitor is redirected to the Wordpress backend.

Configure Wordpress

For this VCL snippet to work, you also need to attach a condition to the Wordpress backend to handle this request:

req.http.X-WP == “1”

Finish adding the VCL

When saved, continue creating other VCLs. You can then run the bash script, then validate and activate your VCLs to complete the process. For complete steps, see Custom Fastly VCL snippets.