HTTP filters

Much like the network level filter stack, Envoy supports an HTTP level filter stack within the connection manager.

Filters can be written that operate on HTTP level messages without knowledge of the underlying physical protocol (HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, etc.) or multiplexing capabilities.

HTTP filters can be downstream filters, associated with a given listener and doing stream processing on each downstream request before routing, or upstream filters, associated with a given cluster and doing stream processing once per upstream request, after the router filter.

There are three types of HTTP level filters:

Decoder

Decoder filters are invoked when the connection manager is decoding parts of the request stream (headers, body, and trailers).

Encoder

Encoder filters are invoked when the connection manager is about to encode parts of the response stream (headers, body, and trailers).

Decoder/Encoder

Decoder/Encoder filters are invoked both when the connection manager is decoding parts of the request stream and when the connection manager is about to encode parts of the response stream.

The API for HTTP level filters allows the filters to operate without knowledge of the underlying protocol.

Like network level filters, HTTP filters can stop and continue iteration to subsequent filters. This allows for more complex scenarios such as health check handling, calling a rate limiting service, buffering, routing, generating statistics for application traffic such as DynamoDB, etc.

HTTP level filters can also share state (static and dynamic) among themselves within the context of a single request stream. Refer to data sharing between filters for more details.

Tip

See the HTTP filters configuration and protobuf sections for reference documentation.

See here for included filters.

Filter ordering

Filter ordering in the http_filters field matters. If filters are configured in the following order (and assuming all three filters are decoder/encoder filters):

http_filters:
  - A
  - B
  # The last configured filter has to be a terminal filter, as determined by the
  # NamedHttpFilterConfigFactory::isTerminalFilterByProto(config, context) function. This is most likely the router
  # filter.
  - C

The connection manager will invoke decoder filters in the order: A, B, C. On the other hand, the connection manager will invoke encoder filters in the reverse order: C, B, A.

Conditional filter configuration

There is some support for having the filter configuration used change based on the incoming request. See the composite filter for details on how to configure a match tree that can resolve filter configuration to use for a given request.

Filter route mutation

During downstream HTTP filter chain processing, when decodeHeaders() is invoked by a filter, the connection manager performs route resolution and sets a cached route pointing to an upstream cluster.

Downstream filters have the capability to directly mutate this cached route after route resolution, via the setRoute callback and DelegatingRoute mechanism.

A filter may create a derived/child class of DelegatingRoute to override specific methods (for example, the route’s timeout value or the route entry’s cluster name) while preserving the rest of the properties/behavior of the base route that the DelegatingRoute wraps around. Then, setRoute can be invoked to manually set the cached route to this DelegatingRoute instance. An example of such a derived class can be found in ExampleDerivedDelegatingRoute.

If no other filters in the chain modify the cached route selection (for example, a common operation that filters do is clearRouteCache(), and setRoute will not survive that), this route selection makes its way to the router filter which finalizes the upstream cluster that the request will be forwarded to.

Route specific config

The per filter config map can be used to provide route or virtual host or route configuration specific config for http filters.

The key of the per filter config map should match the filter config name.

For example, given following http filter config:

http_filters:
- name: custom-filter-name-for-lua # Custom name be used as filter config name
  typed_config: { ... }
- name: envoy.filters.http.buffer # Canonical name be used as filter config name
  typed_config: { ... }

The custom-filter-name-for-lua and envoy.filters.http.buffer will be used as the key to lookup related per filter config.

For the first custom-filter-name-for-lua filter, if no related entry are found by custom-filter-name-for-lua, we will downgrade to try the canonical filter name envoy.filters.http.lua. This downgrading is for backward compatibility and could be disabled by setting the runtime flag envoy.reloadable_features.no_downgrade_to_canonical_name to true explicitly.

For the second envoy.filters.http.buffer filter, if no related entry are found by envoy.filters.http.buffer, we will not try to downgrade because canonical filter name is the same as the filter config name.

Warning

Downgrading to canonical filter name is deprecated and will be removed soon. Please ensure the key of the per filter config map matches the filter config name exactly and don’t rely on the downgrading behavior.

Use of per filter config map is filter specific. See the HTTP filter documentation for if and how it is utilized for every filter.