Nginx Locations and Redirects

Locations are a way to link a URL to a specific file in your filesystem.

Multiple locations can be set per server and Nginx will use the rule with the longest match.

Consider the following:

server {
      listen       80;
      server_name  spmbook.com;

      location / {
          root   html/spmbook;
          index  index.html index.htm;
      }

      location /course {
          alias  html/spm;
          index  index.html index.htm;
      }
}

tells Nginx to serve all content of spmbook.com from the directory html/spmbook, with the exception of any URL containing /course, which will be taken from the html/spm directory.

Thus, for instance:

Using multiple locations is useful, for instance, if you publish different websites under the same domain.

In my case, for instance, the html sources of spmbook.com and spmbook.com/course/2014 live in two different Jekyll repositories: using different locations I can publish one independently from the other, while presenting them as belonging to the same domain.

Nginx rewrite rules specify how URLs have to be redirected.

This is useful when you make changes to your web content which break URLs external sites might still reference, like, for instance, when you move or delete some posts.

Consider, for instance, the following rewrite directive:

server {
      ...
      server_name  ict4g.net www.ict4g.net;

      ...

      rewrite  "/adolfo/spm[0-9]{2}.*$" http://www.spmbook.com/redirected.html;
}

Here, the rewrite rule redirects URLs in the form http://ict4g.net/adolfo/spm[0-9][0-9]/... to http://www.spmbook.com/redirected.html.

This is the rule I use to redirect students trying to access old editions of my Software Project Management course (which used to be published in my home, under spm<YEAR>) to the new dedicated website which hosts all the content related to the course.