NginX redirects

Question

Being a bit of a newbie to NginX redirects and not particularly ninja with my regex, could someone please provide some points for how to do the following 301 redirects in a sane way.

(apologies for awful example names)

website.com/what -> website.com/en/what 
website.com/team -> website.com/en/team
website.com/stuff -> website.com/en/newstuff
website.com/stuff/this -> website.com/en/newstuff/foo/bar
website.com/stuff/that -> website.com/en/newstuff/thing/page

While i would love for someone to give me the exact answer - I'll settle for some good pointers or examples of roughly what i need to be doing or the sort of direction i should take.

If it helps I'm running nginx 0.8x on Ubuntu 11 and site itself is written in CodeIgniter,

Answer 1

Cleanest way is to use a map block.

map $uri $new {    
  /aa                   /en/aa;
  /bb                   /newstuff/bb;
  ^/cc/(?P<suffix>.*)$  /$suffix;
  /john                 /users/john/;
}

server {
  server_name   www.example.com;
  rewrite  ^    $new   permanent;
}

Answer 2

This should be the basic idea:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name website.com;
  root /var/www/website/current/public;

  location /what {
    rewrite /en/what/ redirect;
  }

  location /team {
    rewrite /en/team/ redirect;
  }
}