Once you start using the embedded server for your development projects, you may wish you enable URL rewriting. Rewrites are used by most popular frameworks to do things like add the index.cfm back into SES URLs.

You may be used to configuring URL rewrites in Apache or IIS, but rewrites are also possible in CommandBox's embedded server via a Tuckey servlet filter.

Default Rules

We've already added the required jars and created a default rewrite XML file that will work out-of-the-box with the ColdBox MVC Platform. To enable rewrites, start your server with the --rewritesEnable flag.

start --rewritesEnable

Now URLs like

http://localhost/index.cfm/main

can now simply be

http://localhost/main

The default rewrite file can be found in ~\.CommandBox\cfml\system\config\urlrewrite.xml

Custom Rules

If you want to customize your rewrite rules, just create your own XML file and specify it when starting the server with the rewritesConfig parameter. Here we have a simple rewrite rule that redirects /foo to /index.cfm

customRewrites.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlrewrite>
    <rule>
        <from>^/foo$</from>
        <to type="redirect">/index.cfm</to>
    </rule>
</urlrewrite>

Then, fire up your server with its custom rewrite rules:

start --rewritesEnable rewritesConfig=customRewrites.xml

For more information on custom rewrite rules, consult the Tuckey docs.