wordpress internal redirect using nginx

Question

I have a WordPress site with permalinks set to Post name.

Using Nginx rewrite, I am trying to have an internal redirect (with no change in browser URL), but so far, I am failing.

This works, but the URL changes

location ~ ^/u/(.*) { rewrite ^/u/(.*) /p/?username=$1 redirect; } 

I don't understand why this does not work:

location ~ ^/u/(.*) { # this returns 404 rewrite ^/u/(.*) /p/?username=$1 last; } 

The whole config

server { listen 80; listen [::]:80; server_name example.com; root /srv/www/html; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; index index.php; location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; } location = /robots.txt { allow all; log_not_found off; access_log off; } location ~ ^/u/(.*) { rewrite ^/u/(.*) /p/?username=$1 last; # try_files $uri /p/?username=$1; } location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args; } location ~ \.php$ { client_max_body_size 8M; include fastcgi-php.conf; # Mitigate https://httpoxy.org/ vulnerabilities fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY ""; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass 0.0.0.0:9000; } location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ { expires max; log_not_found off; } } 

I am writing a WordPress plugin, and I want users to enter URLs such as https://example.com/u/john71 and internally redirect to https://example.com/p/?username=john71

Both u and p are WordPress pages, and p contains a shortcode that allows me to retrieve the username.

I could have https://example.com/p/?username=john71, but something like: https://example.com/u/john71 looks better.

Any help on the rewrite rule or approach is welcome.

Answer 1

The URI is ultimately rewritten to /index.php - so the extra internal rewrite is never seen by WordPress.

WordPress parses the original request, which is passed to it in the REQUEST_URI parameter (which will be defined in your fastcgi-php.conf file, which probably includes it from another file called fastcgi_params).

You may be able to make this work by setting REQUEST_URI and SCRIPT_FILENAME directly before calling fastcgi_pass - for example:

location ~ ^/u/(.*) { include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/index.php; fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI /p/?username=$1; fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY ""; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass 0.0.0.0:9000; } 

I haven't included fastcgi-php.conf as it may contain a try_files statement that will not work in this location.