Varnish url redirection does not work

[Paul A. Procacci]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 12:01:57PM +0200, georgi.int at gmail.com wrote:
>    Hello,
>    I would like to ask your for help after explaining the case and the
>    infrastructure for this domain. In the varnish configuration I restrict
>    some types of files to be accessed and downloaded and if some customer
>    wants to use this functionality I configure subdomain on it's domain on
>    nginx where these restrictions are not present. Although, my customer
>    do not want to change the links to the new subdomains (which rely on
>    nginx) in it's application and I want to redirect all old urls
>    (domain.com/somedir/download) to the new one - download.thedomain.com,
>    so if someone open the old url it's redirected to the subdomain on
>    nginx and the content to be loaded from nginx, not varnish (as the way
>    cpanel domain forwarder works).
>    The problem is that when I followed and configured the varnish official
>    documentation url guide it just change the url in varnishlog, but the
>    content is again openef from varnish, not nginx, also the url in the
>    browser is not rewritten.
>    My questions are 1) is it possible and if yes how, but if not 2) what
>    workaround can I use?
>    Thank you in advance. I will wait for you reply.

Hello,

It'd be helpful if you shared the parts of your configuration which perform
the rewriting of the url.

That aside, in order for the browser to request a differnet resource requires
a 301 (or similar) to be delivered from varnish or nginx.  Here's an example:

#####################################################
sub vcl_recv
{
	if(req.http.host ~ "(?i)^nothere\.com$"){
          if(req.url ~ "(i?)^/file\.jpg$") {
                return(synth(750, "http://here.com" + req.url));
	  }
        }
}

sub vcl_synth
{
        if(resp.status == 750){
                set resp.http.Location = resp.reason;
                set resp.status = 301;
                return (deliver);
        }
}
#####################################################

Hope this helps.

~Paul