NGINX rewrite/location regex redirect /index.html$ -> /

Question

I want to maintain one single URL for all pages and I'm using the index index.html directive to have a page at /writing/index.html be displayed when someone visits /writing/. However, with this index directive /writing/index.html is still a valid URL that nginx serves a page at.

I want /writing/index.html to 301 redirect to /writing/, and so forth for the root path (/index.html -> /) and all other URLS too (/foo/bar/index.html -> /foo/bar/).

I want to use a regular expression that only matches the /index.html ending such as: ^(.*/)index\.html$

But if if I add

  rewrite "^(.*)/index\.html$" $1 last;

to my nginx conf I'm seeing /writing/index.html 301 redirect to /writing/ which is good but I also see /writing/ 301 redirect to /writing/ in an infinite loop.

So my question is why does that above rewrite regex match /writing/ when it does not end in index.html? Is it because of the internal index directive in the nginx conf?

I've seen other one off solutions on StackOverflow for redirecting a single path, but not a solution that does it in a clean/generic way like this.

Below is my current nginx.conf

server {
  listen         80;
  server_name example.com *.example.com;

  charset utf-8;

  gzip on;
  gzip_disable "msie6";

  gzip_vary on;
  gzip_proxied any;
  gzip_comp_level 6;
  gzip_buffers 16 8k;
  gzip_http_version 1.1;
  gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

  rewrite "^(.*/)index\.html$" $1 permanent;

  location / {
    root /srv/www/example.com/;
    index index.html;
  }

  error_page 404 /404/;
}

Just a guess... could be that nginx is recursively matching it? which means that the /write/ URL is not matched by the regular expression but once it's re-written to /write/index.html it matches it and it loops. — Fawix
– Fawix, Commented Jul 7, 2015 at 19:42
@Fawix yeah, I think something like that is happening. There is some internal re-routing that is then getting caught by the index directive. Any idea on how to prevent that from happening though? — ehc
– ehc, Commented Jul 7, 2015 at 21:28

ehc · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-07 21:46:14Z

1

So the solution to this problem was to have the rewrite inside a location that checks against the actual request's $request_uri which avoids internal re-routing with the index directive.

Pretty much use this instead:

if ($request_uri ~ "^(.*/)index\.html$") {
  rewrite "^(.*/)index\.html$" $1 permanent;
}

answered Jul 7, 2015 at 21:46

ehc

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Comments

gsf · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-24 17:41:48Z

0

I believe a location block with a return would be more efficient and easier to read:

location ~ ^(.*/)index\.html$ {
    return 301 $1;
}

answered Dec 24, 2015 at 17:41

gsf

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