Tiny HTTP redirector is a specialized HTTP server aimed to provide the
mass-redirect service. Redirector can be considered as lightweight and partial
replacement for Apache mod_rewrite module and redirect option, but has a
very specific purpose: redirect all visitors of a certain domain mirror.tld
to a new location described as URL: http://domain.tld/path?args.
HTTP redirector is based on the power of libevent library and Berkeley DB (ver. 4.8, but nothing besides hardcoded values in Makefile prevents you from using other version), so it's necessary to install these libraries and utilities beforehand.
Under Debian/Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install db4.8-util libdb4.8-dev libdb4.8 libevent-dev
Then just type make to build the ./redirector binary. That's it.
The source data files looks very straightforward and consists of the set of paired lines:
mirror.tld
code:http://domain.tld/path?args
See test_data file to get the idea. code should be either 301 or 302. Just
to mention, code 301 means "Permanent redirect", 302 stands for "Found"
(temporary redirect).
Having created the file, you have to compile it with db4.8_load utility from
the set of db4.8-util.
db4.8_load -f test_data -T -t hash test_data.db
The resulting test_data.db is the file to feed to the redirector.
There is a couple of command line options to configure the redirector.
-f, --file (required). Set the BDB filename
-i, --ip (optional, default "0.0.0.0"). Set the IP to bind to
-p, --port (optional, default 80). Set the port number
-u, --user (optional). Set the effective UID
-v, --verbose (optional). Make the redirector log every request to stdout
-h, --help. For the help.
Simple command to make sure the redirector works:
$ curl --dump-header /dev/stdout http://mirror.tld/
You should get something like this:
HTTP/1.1 301 Redirect
Server: Redirector/0.1
Connection: close
Location: http://domain.tld/path?args
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2011 09:00:00 GMT
Content-Length: 0