How to rewrite location in nginx depending on the client-browser's language?

Question

How to rewrite location in nginx depending on the client-browser's language?

For example: My browser accept-language is 'uk,ru,en'. When I request location mysite.org nginx must forward to mysite.org/uk

Answer 1

You can manage $language_suffix by this setting when you cannot add AcceptLanguageModule module into your system.

rewrite (.*) $1/$http_accept_language 

A more resilient approach would use a map:

map $http_accept_language $lang {         default en;         ~es es;         ~fr fr; }  ...  rewrite (.*) $1/$lang; 

Answer 2

The downside of using AcceptLanguageModule is you cannot rely on automatic system updates anymore. And with every nginx update (even security one), you have to compile Nginx yourself. The second downside is that module assumes that the accept-language is sorted by quality values already. I rather prefer Lua because it can be installed easily in debian based distros:

apt-get install nginx-extras

My colleague Fillipo made great nginx-http-accept-lang script in Lua. It correctly handles quality values and does redirect user accordingly. I've made small modification to that script. It accepts supported languages as input parameter and returns the most qualified language according to Accept-Language header. With returned value you can do whatever you want. It can be used for rewrites, setting lang cookie ...

I'm only using language determination for root path only (location = /). And user lang cookie has preference over browser. My nginx conf looks like this:

map $cookie_lang $pref_lang {
    default "";
    ~en en;
    ~sk sk;
}

server {
    listen 80 default_server;

    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    index index.html index.htm;

    # Make site accessible from http://localhost/
    server_name localhost;

    location = / {
        # $lang_sup holds comma separated languages supported by site
        set $lang_sup "en,sk";
        set_by_lua_file $lang /etc/nginx/lang.lua $lang_sup;
        if ($pref_lang) {
            set $lang $pref_lang;
        }
        add_header Set-Cookie lang=$lang;
        rewrite (.*) $scheme://$server_name/$lang$1;
    }

    location / {
        # First attempt to serve request as file, then
        # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
   }
}