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Add headers to the body

In this tutorial we will see how to extract headers and add them to the JSON body of a request (or a response).

Setup

This guide assumes that you installed the following components:

You also need an upstream service to serve as the target for the requests that you send to test the Gloo Gateway configurations in this tutorial. You can use the publicly available Postman Echo service. Postman Echo exposes a set of endpoints that are very useful for inspecting both the requests sent upstream and the resulting responses. For more information about this service, see the Postman Echo documentation.

Create a static upstream to represent the postman-echo.com remote service.

apiVersion: gloo.solo.io/v1
kind: Upstream
metadata:
  name: postman-echo
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  static:
    hosts:
    - addr: postman-echo.com
      port: 80

Let’s also create a simple Virtual Service that matches any path and routes all traffic to our Upstream:


apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: headers-to-body
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  virtualHost:
    domains:
    - '*'
    routes:
    - matchers:
       - prefix: /
      routeAction:
        single:
          upstream:
            name: postman-echo
            namespace: gloo-system
      options:
        autoHostRewrite: true

We will be sending POST requests to the upstream, so let’s create a simple JSON file that will constitute our request body. Create a file named data.json with the following content in your current working directory:

cat << EOF > data.json
{
  "payload": {
    "foo": "bar"
  }
}
EOF

Let’s test that the configuration was correctly picked up by Gloo Gateway by executing the following command:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" $(glooctl proxy url)/post -d @data.json | jq

You should get a response with status 200 and a JSON body similar to this:

{
  "args": {},
  "data": {
    "payload": {
      "foo": "bar"
    }
  },
  "files": {},
  "form": {},
  "headers": {
    "x-forwarded-proto": "https",
    "host": "postman-echo.com",
    "content-length": "35",
    "accept": "*/*",
    "content-type": "application/json",
    "user-agent": "curl/7.54.0",
    "x-envoy-expected-rq-timeout-ms": "15000",
    "x-request-id": "2ae7b930-bf4f-476e-9c56-d3cec1c564d1",
    "x-forwarded-port": "80"
  },
  "json": {
    "payload": {
      "foo": "bar"
    }
  },
  "url": "https://postman-echo.com/post"
}

Updating the response code

As you can see from the response above, the upstream service echoes the JSON payload we included in our request inside the data response body attribute. We will now configure Gloo Gateway to add the values of two headers to the body:

Update Virtual Service

To implement this behavior, we need to add the following to our Virtual Service definition:

apiVersion: gateway.solo.io/v1
kind: VirtualService
metadata:
  name: headers-to-body
  namespace: gloo-system
spec:
  virtualHost:
    domains:
    - '*'
    routes:
    - matchers:
       - prefix: /
      routeAction:
        single:
          upstream:
            name: postman-echo
            namespace: gloo-system
      options:
        autoHostRewrite: true
    options:
      transformations:
        requestTransformation:
          transformationTemplate:
            # Merge the specified extractors to the request body
            mergeExtractorsToBody: {}
            extractors:
              # The name of this attribute determines where the value will be nested in the body (using dots)
              root:
                # Name of the header to extract
                header: 'root'
                # Regex to apply to it, this is needed
                regex: '.*'
              # The name of this attribute determines where the value will be nested in the body (using dots)
              payload.nested:
                # Name of the header to extract
                header: 'nested'
                # Regex to apply to it, this is needed
                regex: '.*'

The above options configuration is to be interpreted as following:

  1. Add a transformation to all traffic handled by this Virtual Host.
  2. Apply the transformation only to responses.
  3. Use a template transformation.
  4. Define two extractions to extract the required headers from the request. You can control where the values will be nested in the body by using separators in their names (dots if advancedTemplates is false, forward slashes otherwise).
  5. Merge the defined extractions to the request body.

Test our configuration

To test that our configuration has been correctly applied, let’s execute curl command again, adding the two headers:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "root: root-val" -H "nested: nested-val" $(glooctl proxy url)/post -d @data.json | jq

You should get the following output, indicating that the headers have been merged into the request body at the expected locations:

{
  "args": {},
  "data": {
    "payload": {
      "foo": "bar",
      "nested": "nested-val"
    },
    "root": "root-val"
  },
  "files": {},
  "form": {},
  "headers": {
    "x-forwarded-proto": "https",
    "host": "postman-echo.com",
    "content-length": "65",
    "accept": "*/*",
    "content-type": "application/json",
    "nested": "nested-val",
    "root": "root-val",
    "user-agent": "curl/7.54.0",
    "x-envoy-expected-rq-timeout-ms": "15000",
    "x-request-id": "57c255fc-9412-4bf8-97cb-e7f495240703",
    "x-forwarded-port": "80"
  },
  "json": {
    "payload": {
      "foo": "bar",
      "nested": "nested-val"
    },
    "root": "root-val"
  },
  "url": "https://postman-echo.com/post"
}

Cleanup

To cleanup the resources created in this tutorial you can run the following commands:

kubectl delete virtualservice -n gloo-system headers-to-body
kubectl delete upstream -n gloo-system postman-echo