Directly respond to requests

Rather than routing an incoming request to an upstream 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

1. Create a virtual gateway, which selects the default Istio ingress gateway to route incoming traffic (north-south) to your service mesh.

   kubectl apply --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 -f- <<EOF
   apiVersion: networking.gloo.solo.io/v2
   kind: VirtualGateway
   metadata:
     name: ingress-gateway
     namespace: gloo-mesh
   spec:
     workloads:
       # Selects the istio ingress gateway in workload cluster 1
       - selector:
           labels:
             istio: ingressgateway
           cluster: ${REMOTE_CLUSTER1}
     listeners:
       # The port the ingress gateway listens on for incoming requests to route
       - port:
           number: 80
         http: {}
   EOF
   

2. Save the external address of the Istio ingress gateway.

   • GKE: LoadBalancer IP address
   • EKS: LoadBalancer hostname

   
      export CLUSTER_1_INGRESS_ADDRESS=$(kubectl --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 get svc -n istio-system istio-ingressgateway -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')
      echo $CLUSTER_1_INGRESS_ADDRESS
      

   
      export CLUSTER_1_INGRESS_ADDRESS=$(kubectl --context $REMOTE_CONTEXT1 get svc -n istio-system istio-ingressgateway -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].hostname}')
      echo $CLUSTER_1_INGRESS_ADDRESS
      

3. 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:
     hosts:
       - '*'
     # Selects the virtual gateway you previously created
     virtualGateways:
       - name: ingress-gateway
         namespace: gloo-mesh
         cluster: ${REMOTE_CLUSTER1}
     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
   

4. Verify that you receive the expected direct response by curling the ingress gateway address and, if applicable, the path. For example, the following command appends /unsupported-app.

   curl http://$CLUSTER_1_INGRESS_ADDRESS/unsupported-app
   

Add headers to the direct response

You can optionally add headers to the direct responses. In the route table in step 3 of the previous section, you can add the following directResponse.options.headerManipulation section:

      ...
         directResponse:
           body: '{"message": "no longer supported"}'
           status: 510
           options:
             headerManipulation:
               appendResponseHeaders:
                 X-my-response-header: "unsupported-app"