Serve static files based on dynamic URLs with Flask+Nginx?
If the files can be stored with the names that are directly referenced in the "pretty" URL, then you can do a simple rewrite in nginx.
However, it appears that you want to map URL path info to other representations on the disk, as in username -> 11235 and foo.jpg -> 1bcd5.jpg. If the content being served should be protected by authentication or sessions, then you should probably keep the mapping and rewriting inside your Flask app, since Flask provides the means to do that.
If the content can be treated as public and only needs the mapping done, then nginx can be configured to grab query string parameters, look them up in a datastore, and rewrite the URL.
Here's an example from agentzh that was originally posted on the nginx mailing list:
Consider you seo uri is /baz, the true uri is /foo/bar. And I have thefollowing table in my local mysql "test" database:
create table my_url_map(id serial, url text, seo_url);insert into my_url_map(url, seo_url)values('/foo/bar', '/baz');And I build my nginx 0.8.41 this way:
./configure \--add-module=/path/to/ngx_devel_kit \--add-module=/path/to/set-misc-nginx-module \--add-module=/path/to/ngx_http_auth_request_module-0.2 \--add-module=/path/to/echo-nginx-module \--add-module=/path/to/lua-nginx-module \--add-module=/path/to/drizzle-nginx-module \--add-module=/path/to/rds-json-nginx-moduleAlso, I have lua 5.1.4 and the lua-yajl library installed to my system.
And here's the central part in my nginx.conf:
upstream backend { drizzle_server 127.0.0.1:3306 dbname=test password=some_pass user=monty protocol=mysql; drizzle_keepalive max=300 mode=single overflow=ignore;}lua_package_cpath '/path/to/your/lua/yajl/library/?.so';server { ... location /conv-mysql { internal; set_quote_sql_str $seo_uri $query_string; # to prevent sql injection drizzle_query "select url from my_url_map where seo_url=$seo_uri"; drizzle_pass backend; rds_json on; } location /conv-uid { internal; content_by_lua_file 'html/foo.lua'; } location /jump { internal; rewrite ^ $query_string? redirect; } # your SEO uri location /baz { set $my_uri $uri; auth_request /conv-uid; echo_exec /jump $my_uri; }}Contents of foo.lua, the essential glue:
local yajl = require('yajl')local seo_uri = ngx.var.my_urilocal res = ngx.location.capture('/conv-mysql?' .. seo_uri)if (res.status ~= ngx.HTTP_OK) thenngx.throw_error(res.status)endres = yajl.to_value(res.body)if (not res or not res[1] or not res[1].url) thenngx.throw_error(ngx.HTTP_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR)endngx.var.my_uri = res[1].url;Then let's access /baz from the client side:
$ curl -i localhost:1984/bazHTTP/1.1 302 Moved TemporarilyServer: nginx/0.8.41 (without pool)Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:28:42 GMTContent-Type: text/htmlContent-Length: 176Location: http://localhost:1984/foo/barConnection: keep-alive<html><head><title>302 Found</title></head><body bgcolor="white"><center><h1>302 Found</h1></center><hr><center>nginx/0.8.41 (without pool)</center></body></html>