Directly respond to requests

Directly respond to incoming requests without routing the requests to services in your service mesh.

Rather than routing a request to a service within your service mesh, you can send back a pre-defined body and HTTP status response to the client. If necessary, you can also specify headers by using the Header Modification feature in the enclosing route.

For more information, see the Gloo Mesh API docs for route tables.

Create a direct response route table, and specify the status and optional body that is returned. In the following example, the 510 status and no longer supported message are immediately returned in response to any requests to the /unsupported-app path.

  kubectl apply --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 -n global -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: networking.gloo.solo.io/v2
kind: RouteTable
metadata:
  name: direct-response
  namespace: global
spec:
  # Applies to any services within the mesh
  hosts:
    - '*'
  http:
    - name: unsupported-app-route
      # Prefix matching
      matchers:
      - uri:
          prefix: /unsupported-app
      # Immediately returns this 510 response
      directResponse:
        body: '{"message": "no longer supported"}'
        status: 510
EOF

Verify that you receive the expected direct response by sending a request from one service to another on the correct path in your service mesh. For example, log in to an app in your mesh and send a request to http://myapp:9080/unsupported-app. Or, you can create a temporary curl pod within your mesh.
1. Create the curl pod.
```
  kubectl run -it -n bookinfo --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 curl \
  --image=curlimages/curl:7.73.0 --rm  -- sh
  
```
2. Send a request to an app in your mesh on the /unsupported-app path.
```
  curl http://myapp:9080/unsupported-app -v
  
```
3. Exit the temporary pod. The pod deletes itself.
```
  exit
  
```