Rewrite root address to a subdirectory in nginx

Question

I'm converting my mediawiki site to use nginx as a frontend for static files with apache on the backend for php. I've gotten everything working so far except for when I view the root directory "example.com" it tries to serve a directory listing and gives a 403 error since I have that disabled and don't have an index file there.

The apache rewrite rule I have in place right now is simply:

RewriteRule ^$ /wiki/Main_Page [L] 

I tried something similar with a location directive in nginx, but it's not working:

location = / {     rewrite "^$" /wiki/Main_Page; } 

The rest of my location directives are:

location / {     try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite; }  location @rewrite {     rewrite ^/wiki/(.*)$ /w/index.php?title=$1&$args; }  location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {     try_files $uri /w/index.php?title=$1&$args;     expires max;     log_not_found off; }  location ~ \.php?$ {     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;     proxy_set_header Host $host;     proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; } 

I can simply put an index.php file with header('Location:') in it, but I'd rather just do it properly with a rewrite rule.

All the examples I've found online for running mediawiki with nginx run the wiki as wiki.example.com instead of a /wiki/ subdirectory.

Edit: I also tried adding to the try_files like this: try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite /wiki/Main_Page; with the same 403 error result.

Answer 1

I found help in the nginx irc chat.

Basically what I needed to do was use a return instead of rewrite. So I changed this:

location = / {     rewrite "^$" /wiki/Main_Page; } 

to this:

location = / {     return 301 http://www.example.com/wiki/Main_Page; } 

Answer 2

I prefer to use:

location = / {     return 301 http://$host/wiki/Main_Page; }