Tag: rewrite

nginx and rewriting based on GET-parameter (URL-parameters/arguments)

Update: see the comment below from Alan Orth about how to implement this in a much cleaner way now!

When rewriting URLs in Apache through mod_rewrite, you have the possibility of using RewriteCond to only apply rewrites if the original resource has been called with a particular argument in the URL (such as “/file?oid=..”).

The solution in nginx was however a bit different, but thanks to Rewriting URL-params in nginx I got on the right track from the start.

In nginx this information is available through the $args variable, which will contain the complete query string. In Will’s example above he’ll replace the query string, but I were interested in inserting a specific parameter instead (and include the previous query string, so I couldn’t just do the “set $args ..” that he does in the example).

My first try was to simply use $1 in the rewrite destination, but this didn’t work – as rewrite will reset the captured patterns from the previous regular expression (since the rewrite source also is a regular expression). But by introducing my own, temporary variable I were able to save the value from the matching regular expression (for the GET parameter) and use it in my rewrite destination.

The following example shows how I ended up solving the issue. This will rewrite the URL only if the “oid” parameter is found at the beginning of the query string when the URL is requested, and the location = /oldURL limits the rewrite to requests for the old resource.

location = /oldURL {
    if ($args ~ "^oid=(\d+)") {
        set $key1 $1;
        rewrite ^.*$  /newURL?param1=foo¶m2=bar&key1=$key1 last;
    }
}

This will rewrite a request for /oldURL?oid=123&what=cheese to /newURL?param1=foo&param2=bar&key1=123&oid=123&what=cheese — if you want to exclude the previous arguments, you can either just set $args directly to key1=$1 and just use param1=foo and param2=bar in the rewrite destination:

        set $args key1=$1;
        rewrite ^.*$  /newURL?param1=foo¶m2=bar last;

This might be cleaner, depending on what you’re trying to do.

Transparent Remapping of / For Struts Actions

I’ve been trying to find a solution to this issue for a couple of hours: We have several struts actions in our Java-based webapp, all neatly mapped through different .do action handlers. I wanted to switch our handling of the root / index URL (http://www.example.com/) from being a static redirect to the actual action to instead present the content right there, without the useless redirect. This apparently proved to be harder than I thought; after searching a lot through Google, reading through mailing lists and the official documentation, it seems that there is no way to specify an action to handle these requests by default in struts. There may be one, but I could not for the life of ${deity} find it.

As simply doing it in Struts were out of the question, I turned to an old friend of mine, the ever so helpful mod_rewrite. mod_rewrite is capable of rewriting URLs internally in Apache before they get handled at other levels. The problem was that mod_jk seemed to grab the request before the replacements were made, but a few resources pointed me in the correct direction:

After a bit of debugging with the rewritelog, everything came together. This is how it ended up:

       	RewriteEngine On
       	RewriteLog /tmp/rewrite.log
       	RewriteLogLevel 3
       	RewriteRule ^/?$ /destinationfile [PT,NE]

The RewriteLog say that we should log the rewrite progress to /tmp/rewrite.log, and RewriteLogLevel say that we should log at the most detailed format. Use 0, 1, 2 for less debugging information. Remember to comment out these lines when things work. DO NOT use the RewriteLog when not actually debugging the rewrites.