Question

THE INFO

I’m cleaning up a few URLS in my web app by doing some rewriting in NGINX.

The first rewrite I am doing is for handling paging [ex. http://domain.com/p/2%5D, and the second is for a user profile area [ex. http://domain.com/username%5D.

The rewrites I am using are as follow:

rewrite ^/p/(.*)$ /index.php?p=$1; # paging rewrite from /p/<page_number>
rewrite ^/(.*)$ /user.php?user=$1; # user page rewrite from /<username>

The problem

The problem I am having should be pretty easy to spot. Since I am using /p/ and /username, the rewrite doesn’t differentiate between the two and ends up thinking /p/2 should be passed as the user page.

I know I need to run a check of /p/ and treat it differently than anything else to rewrite, but in my reading I have read that IF statements were to be avoided if possible due to potential unexpected results.

Question

Is this a case where an IF statement would be usable, if so what would that look like to ensure I am checking against the proper request coming from the user. If there is a way to do the check without an IF statement, I would like some insight into accomplishing that.

Appreciate any help.

Cheers,

Jared

Answer 1

This is what the last flag is for. Just add it to the first rewrite, and if it matches, then the second rewrite won’t be evaluated:

rewrite ^/p/(.*) /index.php?p=$1 last;
rewrite ^/(.*) /user.php?user=$1;