Masking link with a 302 redirect through nginx not working

Question

I'm trying to mask an affiliate link, so I want to have a 302 redirect through nginx

I want to redirect all /go links to the respective affiliate link, so all link redirects would be like mydomain.com/go/affiliate redirects to > https://www.affiliatelink.com

Right now this is what I have

location /go {
                rewrite ^/affiliate$ https://www.affiliatelink.com redirect; 
     }

I have tried everything and I cannot seem to be able to get it to work. Is there a specific file I need to do it on?

I have already tried both /sites-enabled/default and /conf.d/nginx.conf

Answer 1

Your rewrite doesn't work because the URL path you are requesting is /go/affiliate but the rewrite matches on the exact path /affiliate, which can never be found in location /go anyway. Fixing that is trivial and obvious, but for performance reasons you should avoid regex whenever possible.

Instead of this sort of rewrite, use one of two alternate approaches:

1. If you have only a few URL paths to match, use a location for each one:

   location /go/affiliate {
       return 302 https://affiliate.example.com/;
   }
   

2. If you have a large number of links, I'd say more than 7 or so, use a map instead.

   map $uri $aff_redirect {
       default            "";
       "/go/affiliate"    "https://affiliate.example.com/";
       # more links
   }
   

   A map goes in the http block outside of any server block.

   To use it, check for $aff_redirect variable in the appropriate server block.

   if ($aff_redirect) {
       return 302 $aff_redirect;
   }