How to make nginx remap a part of the URL without sending a redirection?

Question

I have pictures on a path looking like this:

/0/1/2/3/4/01234/screenshots/1.jpg

The URL to access it looks like this:

/static/0/1/2/3/4/01234/screenshots/1.jpg

I'd like it to look like this:

/0/1/2/3/4/01234/a-desc-of-the-picture/screenshots/1.jpg

Or something similar. The goal is to have the keywords in the URL for SEO.

But would like to tell nginx to serve

/0/1/2/3/4/01234/screenshots/1.jpg

When he sees:

/0/1/2/3/4/01234/a-desc-of-the-picture/screenshots/1.jpg

I don't want it to redirect the user to the proper URL, I just want it to do the mapping internally.

Is it possible ? How can I achieve this ?

I've seen something similar here, but I can't find a way to apply it to my case. Something noob friendly would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Assuming you've got a base path that's regexable, you can do something like:

location ~ ^/static/(././././.....)/[^/]+/(.*)$ {
    alias /location/on/filesystem/$1/$2;
}

Nginx's alias directive is more flexible than Apache's equivalent.