8

Yet another nginx rewrite rule question

How can I do a rewrite from http://www.*.domain.com to http://*.domain.com ?

thanks in advance

-- Deb

EDIT:

I'm sorry I didn't see the textile formatting removed the * from my question. I fixed it now. What I need to do is go from www.joe.domain.com to joe.domain.com, where joe could be any word.

Improve this question

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
7

Whats the significance of the extra period before domain.com? Is the goal to remove the www from the URL? If so, this should do the trick:

if ($host ~* www\.(.*)) {
  set $host_without_www $1;
  rewrite ^(.*)$ http://$host_without_www$1 permanent; # $1 contains '/foo', not 'www.mydomain.com/foo'
}

Don't forget to: sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart to load it up

Source: NGINX Wiki

Improve this answer
1
  • I'm sorry I didn't see the textile formatting removed the * from my question. What I need to do is go from www.joe.domain.com to joe.domain.com, where joe could be any word. In so you are right, I just need to remove the www.
    – deb
    May 8, 2010 at 13:38
14

That's quite a bit of a hack.

The fastest way performance wise would be

server {
  server_name www.domain.com;
  rewrite ^ http://domain.com$request_uri permanent;
}

You save a regex match as well as two captures plus you get the advantage of nginx using hash tables to look up the matching server block.

Also, you do not need to restart nginx - a reload is all that's required, and whoever would want to have more down time than required?

Improve this answer
3
  • +1 makes sense...cheers
    – iainlbc
    May 7, 2010 at 20:18
  • 1
    This is not a hack. Nginx does very fast lookup through server names, so this is really the fastest approach.
    – Alexander Azarov
    May 13, 2010 at 7:33
  • 1
    @Alaz That was in response to the answer provided by iainlbc, I meant that the if condition was a hack, not the server look up I recommended.
    – Martin Fjordvald
    May 13, 2010 at 12:17
6

You can use regular expression server names (see http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/server_names.html#regex_names):

server {
  listen 80;
  listen 443;
  server_name ~^www\.(\w+)\.domain\.com$
  location / {
    rewrite ^ $scheme://$1.domain.com$request_uri permanent;
  }
}
Improve this answer
1

Martin F's solution is all well and good, until you've got hundreds of domains. I would, however, suggest going the other way - serve the app at www.joe.domain.com, and redirect from joe.domain.com. Pretty sure that's in an RFC.

Improve this answer
3
  • If you have nginx handle that many domains then write a script to generate the configuration. It's a fairly straight forward configuration language and you really don't want to do regex parsing on every page load on a high traffic server.
    – Martin Fjordvald
    May 8, 2010 at 19:16
  • In principle, perhaps, but have you profiled it? I've had some very high load sites using regex for all requests. It takes care. Also, many shared hosting environments don't have serious performance concerns, but do have management overhead concerns. Both solutions could work well within different paramaters.
    – Justin Alan Ryan
    May 8, 2010 at 19:21
  • If you have hundreds of domains, use regexp in server_name: stackoverflow.com/questions/2498712/nginx-subdomain-rewrite
    – Alexander Azarov
    May 13, 2010 at 7:34

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .