I learned a little something about nginx, a small footprint web server that is ideal for serving up mobile sites, or sites where you don’t want the heavy usage of Apache. Today, I needed to solve a problem where we redirected iPhone/iPod users to a different URL. Since nginx doesn’t use the old-style mod_rewrite rules, I had to learn how to enable redirection in the server.
Since nginx was already compiled with redirection support, I simply had to locate the correct configuration file and add a few lines of code, and away it went.
First, I checked out /etc/nginx/ and opened the site configuration file within the /sites-enabled/ path. For this example, let’s say the site was :
# vi /etc/conf/nginx/sites-enabled/In here, I’d look for the ‘server’ block and add my redirection rules:
server { listen 80; server_name ; root /var/www//public; # redirect iPhone/iPod users to the new iphone site if ($http_user_agent ~* '(iPhone|iPod)') { rewrite ^/$ http:///iphone/index.html; } . . . Then a simple nginx restart:
# /etc/init.d/nginx restart
… and we were all set.
