Rewrite rules

The most common source of worries during an HTTP server switch is the rewrite rules. Unfortunately, Nginx is not directly compatible with the Apache rewrite rules in two regards:

• Usually, rewrite rules are placed within .htaccess files, as discussed in the previous section. Nginx offers no such mechanism, so rewrite rules will have to be placed in a different location.
• The syntax of the rewrite instructions and conditions is quite different and will need to be adapted. Thankfully, the regular expression syntax does not change.

This section will explore some of the issues encountered when porting rules to Nginx, and then will provide some prewritten rules for a couple of major web applications.

General remarks

Before studying practical examples, let us begin with a couple of important remarks regarding rewrite rules in Nginx.

On the location

With all that has been said and written about Nginx, we can safely say that it's not the most appropriate web server for web hosting companies...