Stripping index.html and .html from URLs with nginx

Question

My basic goal is to serve the following clean URLs with nginx:

• / serves /index.html
• /abc/ serves /abc/index.html
• /abc/def serves /abc/def.html
• /abc redirects to /abc/

In order to have canonical names for each resource, I also want to normalize any URL with superfluous file names or extensions:

• /index.html redirects to /
• /abc/index.html redirects to /abc/
• /abc/def.html redirects to /abc/def

The directives I thought would accomplish this:

index index.html; try_files $uri.html $uri $uri/ =404; # Redirect */index and */index.html to *. rewrite ^(.*)/index(\.html)?$ $1 permanent; # Redirect *.html to *. rewrite ^(.+)\.html$ $1 permanent; 

However, the result of this is different than I expected:

• /, /index and /index.html all redirect to / (loop).
• /abc and /abc/ both redirect to /abc/ (loop).

(It works as designed for /abc/def.html and /abc/def; only the directory URLs don't work.)

I'm not sure what is happening here; maybe I'm misunderstanding how the rewrite works?

(I already tried using location blocks instead, but this also results in loops as try_files performs an internal redirect to the location block that sends the HTTP 301.)

Edit: Fundamentally, I need something like a location block that only matches the original request URI, but is ignored for the purpose of internal redirects, so it doesn't create a loop in combination with the try_files directive.

Answer 1

You might be looking for a solution like the one explained here:

server { listen 80; server_name mysite.com; index index.html; root /var/www/mysite/public; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ @htmlext; } location ~ \.html$ { try_files $uri =404; } location @htmlext { rewrite ^(.*)$ $1.html last; } } 

Answer 2

I believe I have found a solution, though I'm not experienced enough to tell if this could break in special cases or could be solved more easily in another way.

Basically, the problem is that a location ~ ... {} block does not only get matched on the original request URI, but also on the result of try_files and other rewrites. So if I have a location block to strip off the index.html or .html with a redirect, then it will not only run when a client requests index.html or abc.html directly, but also if the client requests / or abc and the server internally redirects these to /index.html and abc.html respectively, causing a redirect loop.

However, the redirect module provides an if directive which can check the $request_uri variable - this remains unchanged by internal redirects:

index index.html; try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404; # like "location ~", but only for matching the original request. if ($request_uri ~ /index(.html)?$) { rewrite ^(.*/)index(.html)?$ $1 permanent; } if ($request_uri ~ \.html$) { rewrite ^(.*)\.html$ $1 permanent; } 

(Note that all of these directives now exist in the server context, without any location blocks.)