Creating NGINX Rewrite Rules
In this blog post, we discuss how to create NGINX rewrite rules (the same methods work for both NGINX Plus and the open source NGINX software). Rewrite rules change part or all of the URL in a client request, usually for one of two purposes:
Note: To learn how to convert Apache HTTP server rewrite rules to NGINX rewrite rules, see our companion blog post, Converting Apache Rewrite Rules to NGINX Rewrite Rules.
We’ll assume you’re familiar with the HTTP response codes and with regular expressions (NGINX and NGINX Plus use the Perl syntax).
The two directives for general‑purpose NGINX rewrite are return and rewrite, and the try_files directive is a handy way to direct requests to application servers. Let’s review what the directives do and how they differ.
The return directive is the simpler of the two general‑purpose directives and for that reason we recommend using it instead of rewrite when possible (more later about the why and when). You enclose the return in a server or location context that specifies the URLs to be rewritten, and it defines the corrected (rewritten) URL for the client to use in future requests for the resource.
