Removing HTML extension with Nginx in NixOS

Posted on by Flinner Yuu One min read

The Problem

Having your website end in ".html" doesn't look cool at all B)

Example

  https://ammar.engineer/about.html
  https://ammar.engineer/about

The first one looks ugly, doesn't it?

How my config looks like:

(Don't forget to open ports!)

    security.acme = {
    acceptTerms = true;
    # email = "email@domain.com"; # I decide to place my email on each domain explicitly
  };
  
  services.nginx.enable = true;
  services.nginx.recommendedOptimisation = true;
  services.nginx.recommendedTlsSettings = true;
  services.nginx.recommendedProxySettings = true;
  services.nginx.recommendedGzipSettings = true;


  security.acme.certs."ammar.engineer".email = "email@domain.com";
  services.nginx.virtualHosts."ammar.engineer_main" = {
    serverName = "ammar.engineer";
    forceSSL = true;
    enableACME = true;
    locations."/" = {root = "/var/www/ammar.engineer";};
  };

Fixing it 

  # [ .. Truncated ..]
  services.nginx.virtualHosts."ammar.engineer_main" = {
    serverName = "ammar.engineer";
    forceSSL = true;
    enableACME = true;
    locations."/" = {
      root = "/var/www/ammar.engineer";
      # <<<<<<<<<<<<<
      # forward /somthing.html  to /something
      # https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38228393/nginx-remove-html-extension
      extraConfig = ''
                            if ($request_uri ~ ^/(.*)\.html) {
                                return 302 /$1;
                                }
                                try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
                          '';
      # >>>>>>>>>>>>>
    };
  };

That's it!