10. Building a Simple Gateway Using Spring MVC

Spring Cloud Gateway provides a utility object called ProxyExchange which you can use inside a regular Spring MVC handler as a method parameter. It supports basic downstream HTTP exchanges via methods that mirror the HTTP verbs, or forwarding to a local handler via the forward() method.

Example (proxying a request to "/test" downstream to a remote server):

@RestController
@SpringBootApplication
public class GatewaySampleApplication {

	@Value("${remote.home}")
	private URI home;

	@GetMapping("/test")
	public ResponseEntity<?> proxy(ProxyExchange<Object> proxy) throws Exception {
		return proxy.uri(home.toString() + "/image/png").get();
	}

}

There are convenience methods on the ProxyExchange to enable the handler method to discover and enhance the URI path of the incoming request. For example you might want to extract the trailing elements of a path to pass them downstream:

@GetMapping("/proxy/path/**")
public ResponseEntity<?> proxyPath(ProxyExchange<?> proxy) throws Exception {
  String path = proxy.path("/proxy/path/");
  return proxy.uri(home.toString() + "/foos/" + path).get();
}

All the features of Spring MVC are available to Gateway handler methods. So you can inject request headers and query parameters, for instance, and you can constrain the incoming requests with declarations in the mapping annotation. See the documentation for @RequestMapping in Spring MVC for more details of those features.

Headers can be added to the downstream response using the header() methods on ProxyExchange.

You can also manipulate response headers (and anything else you like in the response) by adding a mapper to the get() etc. method. The mapper is a Function that takes the incoming ResponseEntity and converts it to an outgoing one.

First class support is provided for "sensitive" headers ("cookie" and "authorization" by default) which are not passed downstream, and for "proxy" headers (x-forwarded-*).