One url Apache-style 301 redirects in nginx

9 January 2009

Note: this post is outdated. Use at your own risk.

In Apache, you can create an .htaccess file to house 301 Redirect statements, or you can do it in the main config file. It is easy, and common. To change the url that appears in a client browser, as well as tell it where to find something that is no longer located in an original place, you would write something like this for http://mysampledomain.com:

Redirect 301 /original_location/ http://mysampledomain.com/new_location/

where http://mysampledomain.com/original_location/ is where the client is looking for the file, but would not find it, and http://mysampledomain.com/new_location is what you want used when the original is requested as well as in the future.

Easy, right?

I searched and searched for good documentation on how to do this with nginx. I found great documentation for doing it with a regex, such as this sample code you could put in your site-specific vhost file at /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysampledomain.com for forcing browsers to use the domain name without www.

server {
listen  80;
server_name  www.mysampledomain.com;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://mysampledomain.com/$1 permanent;
}

What I couldn’t find was a simple way to do static redirects, like in my sample above. So, tonight I did some experimenting and figured it out. I hope this helps someone else. Put something like this in your /etc/nginx/sites-available/mysampledomain.com file, in the main server section (see second example following this one).

        location /original_location/ {
                rewrite /original_location/ http://mysampledomain.com/new_location/ permanent;
        }

That would fit in a file like the one I used in my previous post like this.

server {
listen  80;
server_name  www.matthewhelmke.net;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://matthewhelmke.net/$1 permanent;
}

server {
listen  80;
server_name  matthewhelmke.net;

access_log  /home/myusername/public_html/matthewhelmke.net/log/access.log;
error_log   /home/myusername/public_html/matthewhelmke.net/log/error.log;

        location /original_location/ {
                rewrite /original_location/ http://mysampledomain.com/new_location/ permanent;
        }

location / {
root   /home/myusername/public_html/matthewhelmke.net/public;
index  index.html index.htm index.php;

# this serves static files that exist without running other rewrite tests
if (-f $request_filename) {
expires 30d;
break;
}

# this sends all non-existing file or directory requests to index.php
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
}

}

# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index  index.php;
fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /home/myusername/public_html/matthewhelmke.net/public$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
}

Have fun! You now have one less reason to give why a person shouldn’t use ngnix instead of Apache.