Question

I’ve seen a few ways to rewrite the $request_uri and add the index.html to it when that particular file exists in the file system, like so:

if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
    rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
}

but i was wondering if the opposite is achievable:

i.e. when somebody requests http://example.com/index.html, they’re redirected to http://example.com

Because the nginx regexp is perl compatible, i tried something like this:

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

but it was mostly a guesswork, is there any good documentation describing the modrewrite for nginx ?

Answer 1

I use the following rewrite in the top level server clause:

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

Using this alone works for most URLs, like http://example.com/bar/index.html, but it breaks http://example.com/index.html. To resolve this, I have the following additional rule:

location = /index.html {
  rewrite  ^ / permanent;
  try_files /index.html =404;
}

The =404 part returns a 404 error when the file is not found.

I have no idea why the first rewrite alone isn’t sufficient.