Question

OK I have been working on multiple approaches to this but can’t really find a viable solution.

We have a legacy site that has sub-domains being used as categories and the url structure looks like this.

http://www.my_category.my_site.com/subcategory/article_123.html

I need to find a way to redirect (using 301’s) to

http://www.my_site.com/articles/my_category/sub_category/article-123

I have looked at nginx redirects (which will not work as you cant modify the path – changing underscores to dashes)

Rails routing doesn’t seem to work with the 2 subdomains (www.mycategory)

Rack Rewrite doesn’t quiet do the trick either (It only redirects to the same sub-domain).

Any ideas on the best approach? I’m not ruling out the above but would like to see what people think?

Answer 1

With nginx it’s easy as ABC:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name ~^www\.(?<category>my_category)\.my_site\.com$;
    return 301 http://www.my_site.com/articles/$category$request_uri;
}

• http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/server_names.html
• http://nginx.org/r/server_name
• http://nginx.org/r/return
• http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#variables
• man pcresyntax
• man pcrepattern