Comprehensive Rewrite Rules / Regular Expressions Guide?

Server NGINX
1

Hey everyone,

I want to modify some rewrites I currently have in my nginx.conf, but I
could not find proper documentation of the available operators and
language constructs to do so. Googling I found tons of people trying to
convert rewrite rules from apache to nginx, but since I have never used
apache, this is not very helpful to me. Is there some document
explaining all supported operators for the regular expressions?

For example, I have something like $host ~* “www” in my config, and from
the context I can guess that ~* seems to check whether the left hand
side contains the right hand side. But I did not find a proper
specification in any regular expressions guides.

My current problem at the moment is that I want to say something like
“if the domain used is not already www.example.de, than change it that
way”. I want that all example.com, example.org… are rewritten to read
www.example.de. So I need to know wether there is a possibility to
negate a condition, or something like “unless” or so. However, this is
only one problem I have right now, I would very much like to understand
the bigger picture and all the options I have in rewritting stuff. Is
there a document listing those options?

2

2009/4/1 Ole R. [email protected]:

the context I can guess that ~* seems to check whether the left hand
side contains the right hand side. But I did not find a proper
specification in any regular expressions guides.

I think this should make the trick:

if ($host !~* “^www.exemple.de”) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ http://www.exemple.de$1 permanent;
}

My current problem at the moment is that I want to say something like
“if the domain used is not already www.example.de, than change it that
way”. I want that all example.com, example.org… are rewritten to read
www.example.de. So I need to know wether there is a possibility to
negate a condition, or something like “unless” or so. However, this is
only one problem I have right now, I would very much like to understand
the bigger picture and all the options I have in rewritting stuff. Is
there a document listing those options?

http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpRewriteModule
and
http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpCoreModule#Variables

3

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 12:27:49PM +0200, J?r?me Loyet wrote:

For example, I have something like $host ~* “www” in my config, and from
the context I can guess that ~* seems to check whether the left hand
side contains the right hand side. But I did not find a proper
specification in any regular expressions guides.

I think this should make the trick:

if ($host !~* “^www.exemple.de”) {
rewrite ^(.*)$ http://www.exemple.de$1 permanent;
}

No.

server  {
     server_name  www.example.de;
     ...
}

server  {
     server_name  _; # any names

     rewrite   ^   http://www.example.de$request_uri? permanent;
}
4

No.

server  {
     server_name  www.example.de;
     ...
}

server  {
     server_name  _; # any names

     rewrite   ^   http://www.example.de$request_uri? permanent;
}

Thank you, this works just fine.

Thanks aswell for the wiki links, I hope they will help me with future
problems.

5

2009/4/1 Igor S. [email protected]:

    rewrite  ^  http://www.example.de$request_uri? permanent;
  }

What about this?

server {
listen 80;
server_name michaelshadle.com;
index index.php index.html;
… etc …
}

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

Any better?

Any worse?

6

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 03:50:53AM -0700, Michael S. wrote:

š š š š server_name š_; # any names
… etc …
Any worse?
rewrite ^ http://michaelshadle.com$request_uri? permanent;

slightly faster than

     rewrite ^(.*) http://michaelshadle.com$1 permanent;