Bulk redirection with Nginx

In this post, I am going to talk about how you can setup a redirects on a server for many individual paths. It uses the hash map

Creating files▶

Create a file called redirects-map.conf, each line of the file will represents a redirect rule. The format of line is:

<old_location> <new_url>;

old_location can be specified in both regex or plan simple path.

The regex version looks likes this:

~^/showcase/(.*)?$ /projects/;

The plan simple location redirect will look like:

/contact-success/ /contact;

So your redirects-map.conf file should look like:

# /etc/nginx/redirects-map.conf 

/contact-success/ /contact;
~^/showcase/(.*)?$ /projects/;

Setting up nginx▶

1. Upload the redirects-map.conf to your server at /etc/nginx
2. Add the following at the top of your nginx virtualhost file, which imports the file and creates a hash map:

map $uri $redirected_url {
    default "none";
    include /etc/nginx/redirects-map.conf;
}

Then in the server block, write the following rule:

# pre-defined redirects
if ($redirected_url != "none") {
    rewrite ^ $redirected_url permanent;
}

Now your virtualhost conf file should look like:

map $uri $redirected_url {
    default "none";
    include /etc/nginx/redirects-map.conf;
}

server {
    listen        443 ssl http2;
    server_name   example.org;

    # pre-defined redirects
    if ($redirected_url != "none") {
        rewrite ^ $redirected_url permanent;
    }

    # rest of the rules

}