How to use nginx rewrite?

Question

So I've been playing with rewrite for awhile, and I can't get it.

Basically, when a user visits http://mydomain.com/images/username.png I want it to actually display the results of http://mydomain.com/stats.php?user=username

This was what I had before I finally gave up:

rewrite "/images/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+).png" /home/wwwroot/stats.php?user=$1;

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Don't use the file path for your replacement. Try this:

rewrite ^/images/([-\w]+)\.png$ /stats.php?user=$1;

And you'll want to make sure that your PHP code is setting the right MIME type on the response.