How can I create a location in nginx that works with AND without a trailing slash?

Question

Right now I have this config:

location ~ ^/phpmyadmin/(.*)$
{
        alias /home/phpmyadmin/$1;
}

However, if I visit www.mysite.com/phpmyadmin (note the lack of trailing slash), it won't find what I'm looking for a 404. I assume because I don't include the trailing slash. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

It might be in the regular expression that you're using --

location ~ ^/phpmyadmin/(.*)$

The above will match /phpmyadmin/, /phpmyadmin/anything/else/here, but it won't match /phpmyadmin because the regular expression includes the trailing slash.

You probably want something like this:

location ~ /phpmyadmin/?(.*)$ {
    alias /home/phpmyadmin/$1;
}

The question mark is a regular expression quantifier and should tell nginx to match zero or one of the previous character (the slash).

HTH

Answer 2

The better solution:

location ~ ^/phpmyadmin(?:/(.*))?$ {
    alias /home/phpmyadmin/$1;
}

Ensure that server has permissions to /home/phpmyadmin first.

---

Explanation of difference with accepted answer:

It's all about regular expressions.

First of all, the ^ char means that you want to match from beginning of string and not somewhere in the middle. The $ at the end means matching to the end of the string.

The (?:) means non-capturing group - we don't want it in the capturing results, but we want to simple group some chars. We group it like this, because we want the / char to be a nonsignificant part of the child path, and not a significant part of the parent path.

Answer 3

Why wouldn't you just use

location /phpmyadmin {
    alias /home/phpmyadmin;
}

?

Answer 4

I know this is an old question, but for anybody that ends up here via Google, I solved it the following way (variation of @kbec's one, which was quite good):

location ~ ^/foo(/.*)?$ {
  proxy_pass http://$backend$1$is_args$args
}

This will capture any variation of /foo and redirect it to /bar on another url (including parameters). I am showing it with a proxy_pass directive but it would also work with alias.

• /foo -> /bar
• /foo/ -> /bar/
• /foo/sub -> /bar/sub
• /foo/sub1/sub2/?param=value -> /bar/sub1/sub2/?param=value

It works because $1 will optionally capture the subresources plus the leading slash, so it won't capture things like /fooextra/. It will also redirect a present or non-present ending slash properly.

Answer 5

This redirect will only rewrite URLs with and without the trailing slash. Anything that comes after the slash won't be overwritten.

domain.com/location => redirected to domain.com/new/location
domain.com/location => redirected to domain.com/new/location
domain.com/location/other => not redirected

server {
  # 301 URL Redirect
  rewrite ^/location/?$ /new/location permanent;
}

Answer 6

Have you tried using try_files directive?

try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

Answer 7

I did it like that

rewrite ^/promo/?$     http://example.com/promo/page43902.html;
location /promo/ {
    root /var/www;
}