A previous work project involved changing our blog software and server configuration. Date-based URLs would no longer be used, and the blog would be run within the main site instead of on a subdomain. The “slug” (which is this-is-the-page-slug in this example) would be retained for blog posts in the new app.

Mapping URLs from the old format of http://subdomain.domain.com/2007/3/19/this-is-the-page-slug to the new format of http://www.domain.com/blog/this-is-the-page-slug (at the nginx level) involved using the the NginxHttpRewriteModule and two regular expressions. I wanted to share this configuration as others may have similar needs.

The following snippet was added within a server context to the nginx configuration file:

if ($host ~* "^subdomain.domain.com$"){
  rewrite ^.*(?=\/)(.+)$ http://www.domain.com/blog$1 permanent;
  break;
}

I developed this with help from a colleague who was formerly a perl programmer, and introduced me to a lookaround, also known as a “zero-width positive look-ahead assertion”.

The “positive lookahead” matches the forward slash (escaped) character: (?=\/), without making it part of the match. The .* means any character and since * is greedy by default, the whole URL up to the final forward slash character matches. Finally, (.+) forms the first backreference $1 (lookaheads do not create capturing groups), which is used in the new URL as the second argument to rewrite. Reload the nginx config and enjoy.

I hope this helped a little with doing a URL rewrite in nginx, and provided some information on regular expressions.