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I have a system running Apache that directs all HTTP traffic to HTTPS via the Redirect directive:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    Redirect permanent / https://www.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

I would like to have a single URL (/status, provided by the mod_status module) accessible via HTTP without the redirect. (This is so I can script our automation system to check Apache's status via localhost and not worry about the precise hostname in the automation rules.)

Question: Is there a way to exempt a single URL from the Redirect directive, without modifying that Redirect directive?

I know I can get the behavior I want by changing the VirtualHost definition above to the following:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    RedirectMatch permanent ^(/(?!server-status).*)$ https://www.example.com$1
</VirtualHost>

(This is the solution from question 317890)

I don't want to do that, though, because I want the automation rules controlling the mod_status page to be independent of the rules controlling the redirects. (Not all managed systems have the same redirects, for one thing.)

Ideally, I'd like to have a single line or set of lines that I can just drop into a config file alongside the mod_status configuration that says, basically, "I don't care what other configuration you see, always let http://localhost/status through to be handled by mod_status without any redirects."

I can adjust the order of the directives to put my various configuration pieces (the redirect, the mod_status config, the hypothetical answer to my question) in any order necessary.

I'm running RHEL 6 and RHEL 7 systems, so I've got a mix of Apache 2.2 and 2.4 (but if something only works with 2.4, I can grudgingly deal with it).

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Is there a way to exempt a single URL from the Redirect directive, without modifying that Redirect directive?

No

(at least with the exception of the method you have already described or fronting all your servers with a big TLS terminating content manager).

Further, even if it were possible, you need to perform major surgery on any browser which has ever seen a 301 redirect in order to stop them remembering (301 redirects are cached indefinitely).

What have you got against fetching your status page via HTTPS?

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  • My preference is to only serve the status page over localhost connections, but that means the monitoring software is pulling from a URL of http://localhost/status, which won't match the server's SSL certificate, so I'd have to do extra work to either disable certificate verification or adapt the localhost-only rules. I was hoping to avoid extra work. :)
    – asciiphil
    Feb 17, 2017 at 19:09

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