Mastering Nginx

Rewrite Rule Guide

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Of course, what is inside the location context is dependent upon your setup, but the

principle remains the same; matches against the URI are best served by a location.

This principle also applies to RewriteRules that have an implicit REQUEST_URI. These
are typically bare RewriteRules that transform the URI from an older format to a

newer one. In the following example, we see that the show.do is no longer necessary:

RewriteRule ^/controller/show.do$ http://example.com/controller

[L,R=301]

This translates to an NGINX configuration as follows:

location = /controller/show.do {

rewrite ^ http://example.com/controller permanent;

}

Not to get too carried away with creating locations whenever we see a RewriteRule,

we should keep in mind that regular expressions translate directly.

Rule #3: Replace matches against HTTP_HOST with a server

Related closely to Rule #2, this rule takes configurations into account that try to either

remove or add a www onto a domain name. These types of rewrite rules are often
found in .htaccess files or in virtual hosts with overloaded ServerAliases:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Here, we translate the case where no www is found at the beginning of the Host part
of the URL to the variant with a www there:

server {

server_name example.com;

rewrite ^ http://www.example.com$request_uri permanent;

}