如何将nginx中的URL重写到更新的位置？

Question

I have the following URLs:

1) http://example.com/downloads/
2) http://example.com/downloads/widgets
3) http://example.com/downloads/gadgets

These URLs need to be redirected rewritten to the following:

1) http://example.com/products/
2 & 3 & etc) http://example.com/products/thingies

I'm currently trying the following nginx code:

location ~* ^/downloads/ {
    rewrite ^/downloads/$ /products break;
    rewrite ^/downloads/(.*)$ /products/thingies break;
}

It's almost working, however my site's document root is /var/www/example.com/public . So after processing the rewrite rules, nginx tries to literally serve /var/www/example.com/public/products/ , whereas I want it to just rewrite to http://example.com/products/ (which then proxies to PHP and so on).

Where am I failing? Is there a different, better way to accomplish this?

Thank you for any help.

-- UPDATE --

I got it to work by using the following rules:

rewrite ^/downloads/?$ $scheme://$host/tools last;

location ~* ^/downloads/ {
    rewrite ^/downloads/?$ $scheme://$host/products last; 
    rewrite ^/downloads/(.*)$ $scheme://$host/products/thingies last;
}

IS this the proper way of doing it in nginx? I haven't seen this rewrite rule format anywhere while researching this. It somehow seems odd.

Answer 1

Your update redirects, not rewrites.

Here is how I would do:

location /downloads/ {
    rewrite ^ /products/thingies;
}

location = /downloads/ {
    rewrite ^ /products/;
}

# uncomment if you need '/downloads' (without trailing slash) act as '/downloads/'
#location = /downloads {
#    rewrite ^ /products/;
#}

Answer 2

The correct syntax appears to be:

location ~* ^/downloads/ {
    rewrite ^/downloads/?$ /products permanent; 
    rewrite ^/downloads/(.*)$ /products/thingies permanent;
}