Deprecated - Using Wildcards in Page Rules

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This tutorial is deprecated in favour of Understanding and configuring Cloudflare Page Rules (Page Rules Tutorial) · Cloudflare Support docs

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The basic page rule

If we have a page rule set to match:

example.com

It will match both http://example.com and https://example.com. You do not need to specify http:// or https:// to match in the page rule, unless you want to limit it to only trigger on that protocol. You do not need a wildcard (*) to match both http and https.

Wildcards

In page rules, the asterisk (*) can be used as a wildcard, for instance, if we have a page rule set to match:

example.com/a*z

It will match example.com/abcdz and example.com/axyz, the asterisk means it will match any subdirectory beginning with a and ending with z

Wildcard examples

example.com/* would match

  • https://example.com/anything
    or
  • http://example.com/anything
    or
  • http://example.com

but NOT a subdomain of example.com like subdomain.example.com .

Adding another wildcard before, such as:
*example.com/*
would match anything before the example.com as well, for example it would match https://example.com and also subdomain.example.com

Adding a dot after the first wildcard, such as:
*.example.com/*
would match anything before the example.com , but not example.com itself. It would match subdomain.example.com , but NOT example.com

Use with ‘Forwarding URL’

The page rule wildcards can be useful to match a section of your website or those of a certain file type, however it can also be useful when redirecting using the ‘Forwarding URL’ setting. It can then be used alongside the $ symbol in the URL to forward to.

For example, if you set:

example.com/*
Forwarding URL
https://www.example.com/$1

This would match any path on example.com and redirect it to the same path on www.example.com. E.g. example.com/abc would redirect to https://www.example.com/abc.

You can use $1, $2, $3 etc. to match any *.

You can read more in the tutorial, Deprecated - Using page rules to perform redirects.

Note that an ‘Orange Clouded’ DNS record is required for a page rule to run

For example:
If I wanted a page rule to match subdomain.example.com, then I would need to add a DNS record for subdomain and set it to :orange:.

Relevant support article:

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/218411427#understand-wildcard-matching-and-referencing

Tutorial Reference: CT-30

Reviewed: 08/21

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