How do I redirect/handle requests from search engines via nginx using location regex

nginx, server-configuration, web-applications

Solution

You cannot check for arguments in the location name (nginx docs):

Note that locations of all types test only a URI part of request line without arguments. This is done because arguments in the query string may be given in several ways, for example:

/index.php?user=john&page=1 /index.php?page=1&user=john

You could setup a rewrite rule in the server section (found here):

if ($args ~ “_escaped_fragment_=(.+)”) {
    set $real_url $1;
    rewrite ^ /crawler$real_url;
}

and define a "/crawler" location, which can be redirected to your HTML generating server.

Problem

I have developed an ajax-based web application with hash bang urls. I am trying to redirect requests from search engines to another server which generates HTML snapshots and send the response. I am trying to achieve this in nginx with the location directive as mentioned below: ``` location ~ ^(/?_escaped_fragment_=).*$ { proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_connect_timeout 60s; proxy_send_timeout 90s; proxy_read_timeout 90s; proxy_buffering off; proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k; proxy_pass http://x1.x2.x3.x4:8080; proxy_redirect off; } ``` But I am not able to get this working. Can someone correct the regex I am using (or) provide me an alternative solution to achieve this. Thanks in advance.

Original source