Nginx Tweaks

The point of this article is to show you how to do some commonly-desired tweaks in Nginx while in the meantime helping you understand how it works.

Do not require .html in URLs

If your website is using lots of .html files for pages, it's sort of overkill to make people type that in for every page they are looking for. We can remove that requirement with Nginx.

Open your site's configuration file in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ and within the server block, there should be a location block that looks something like this if you have followed the guide here.

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404 ;
}

What this means is that in the file location of /, i.e. anywhere and everywhere in the root file system, We will look for the three things listed in try_files in that order:

1. $uri: a file that directly matches the content added after the domain.
2. $uri/: a directory that directly matches the content added after the domain.
3. =404: if neither of those is found, we give a 404 error, which as you probably know, signified "Page not found."

We will now change the content inside the location block to the below:

location / {
    if ($request_uri ~ ^/(.*)\.html$) { return 302 /$1; }
    try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404 ;
}

$1 here refers to the first content in the parentheses () in the preceeding regular expression.