Nginx rewrite .html to .php

nginxrewrite

I've setup my first Nginx site and the important rewrites are all done. They had to be manual, no rules would possibly have handled it, so I have a raft of rules like this to handle old URLs that might be indexed or bookmarked:

rewrite ^/html/Air_III.html /designers-elements-air permanent;

There is another set of odd files that seem to get traffic, in parts of the site that we haven't gotten to yet so I just copied them over. Most of these were renamed .php from the old .html and are otherwise unchanged, but there are probably some that are still .html.

I'm looking for a rule that will handle the case of a request for any .html file, in any directory, that doesn't actually match a current file by that name and will rewrite to a .php file if it exists.

In "Apache speak" this would be a redirect permanent rather than a rewrite. I'd rather not track all these down and do them by hand!

Best Answer

You'll need an if statement to check the file existance and rewrite appropriately:

location ~ \.html$ {
    if (!-f $request_filename) {
        rewrite ^(.*)\.html$ $1.php permanent;
    }
}

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Turn out my first answer to this question was correct at certain time, but it turned into another pitfall - to stay up to date please check Taxing rewrite pitfalls

I have been corrected by many SE users, so the credit goes to them, but more importantly, here is the correct code:

server {
       listen         80;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       return         301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}

server {
       listen         443 ssl;
       server_name    my.domain.com;
       # add Strict-Transport-Security to prevent man in the middle attacks
       add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000" always; 

       [....]
}

Nginx rewrite all html files except index

You pretty much need to use a if statement, but it's perfectly safe to do so if you only have rewrite directives inside it. You want to check the $uri variable since this includes modifications made by the index module.

if ($uri !~ /index\.html$) {
    rewrite ^/test/(\d\d\d\d)/(\d\d)/(.+)\.html$ /$1/$2/$3/ permanent;
}

To remove the index.html part you need to send a redirect, but only if the client specified index.html, and it wasn't added by the index module. This means we need another if statement to check this. We use the $request_uri variable here which is what the client actually sent.

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

Best Answer

Related Solutions

NGINX Redirect – How to Rewrite All HTTP Requests to HTTPS While Maintaining Sub-Domain

Correct way in new versions of nginx

Nginx rewrite all html files except index

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