Rewrite spring-security redirect URLs

Question

I'm trying to get Tuckey UrlRewriteFilter to tidy up URLs for my webapp. One problem I've got is that when spring-security notices that an anonymous user is trying to access a protected resource it redirects to a URL which includes the servlet path.

What I'd like is, by example:

> GET http://localhost:8080/my-context/protected-resource
< Location: http://localhost:8080/my-context/login

What I currently get is:

> GET http://localhost:8080/my-context/protected-resource
< Location: http://localhost:8080/my-context/-/login

Relevant documents I've found so far:

DefaultRedirectStrategy, which does the actual redirect in question: http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/docs/3.0.x/apidocs/org/springframework/security/web/DefaultRedirectStrategy.html. It has a contextRelative property which is tempting but I don't think is going to cut it, if I can even find a way of configuring it.

A blog post that helped get me this far: http://nonrepeatable.blogspot.com/2009/11/using-spring-security-with-tuckey.html

What I'd like to know is:

1. Can/should I convince Tuckey to rewrite the Location header. <outbound-rule> doesn't seem to help any here.
2. Can/should I somehow tweak the SS config to emit the rewritten URL. I don't think this is quite as tidy, as it'd break if rewrite was disabled.

web.xml looks like

<filter>
    <filter-name>UrlRewriteFilter</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.tuckey.web.filters.urlrewrite.UrlRewriteFilter</filter-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>LogLevel</param-name>
        <param-value>log4j</param-value>
    </init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>UrlRewriteFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
</filter-mapping>

<filter>
    <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
    <dispatcher>FORWARD</dispatcher>
    <dispatcher>INCLUDE</dispatcher>
    <dispatcher>ERROR</dispatcher>
</filter-mapping>

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>my-servlet</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>psms</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/-/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

urlrewrite.xml looks like:

<urlrewrite>
    <rule>
        <from>^/(.*)$</from>
        <to>/-/$1</to>
    </rule>
</urlrewrite>

applicationContent-security.xml looks like:

<http auto-config="true">
    <!-- allow GET requests to /login without authentication -->
    <intercept-url pattern="/-/login" method="GET" filters="none"/>

    <intercept-url pattern="/-/admin/**" access="ROLE_ADMIN"/>
    <intercept-url pattern="/-/**" access="ROLE_USER"/>

    <form-login login-page="/-/login"
                login-processing-url="/-/login.do"
                authentication-failure-url="/-/login?login_error"
                default-target-url="/-/index"
                always-use-default-target="true"/>

    <logout logout-url="/-/logout"
            logout-success-url="/-/login"/>

    <access-denied-handler error-page="/-/access-denied"/>
</http>

Answer 1

I looked into this issue for our project last year and at that time the problem was that Tucky wasn't cooperating with response.encodeRedirectUrl() to rewrite redirect URLs. I contacted them but I haven't followed up on this.

My solution was to allow the messy URL to go back to the client but then clean it up with a Tucky redirect rule (a second redirect).

So add another rule that matches your ugly URL from the security redirect and issue your own redirect to the clean URL:

<rule>
    <from>^/whatever/ugly.*$</from>
    <to type="redirect">/login</to>
</rule>

Yes, it involves two redirects, but the client will never see it... which is probably the point.