Using Nginx Rewrite and Proxy_pass for URL Redirection (Changing and Preserving Browser URL)

In daily operations you often need to redirect from one link to another, which can be divided into two scenarios: the browser URL changes or the browser URL remains unchanged.

1. URL changes – use the Nginx rewrite module. The rewrite directive rewrites the request URI based on a regular expression and redirects to a replacement, ending with a flag.

The flag can be one of the following:

last – after the rule matches, continue processing with the new location URI.

break – stop processing any further rules.

redirect – return a 302 temporary redirect; the browser shows the new URL.

permanent – return a 301 permanent redirect; the browser shows the new URL.

Typically a 301 permanent redirect is used to implement URL redirection.

2. URL unchanged – use location with proxy_pass or rewrite with last or break . The location block’s proxy_pass can forward the request while keeping the original address visible to the user.

Example (1): Redirect https://api.gwhome.com/data/app to https://images.com/data/app/gw.html .

server {
    listen      443;
    server_name  gwhome;
    access_log  /data/nginx/logs/gwhome-access.log main;
    error_log   /data/nginx/logs/gwhome-error.log;
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /data/nginx/ssl/gwhome.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /data/nginx/ssl/gwhome.key;
    ssl_session_timeout 5m;

    location = /data/app {
        rewrite /data/app /data/app/gw.html break;
        proxy_pass https://images.com;
    }
}

Example (2): Redirect requests from 192.168.210.85:8190/gwgou/order/commdany to 192.164.60.89:8089/order/commdany .

server {
    listen 8190;
    server_name 192.168.210.85;
    index   index.html index.php index.htm;
    location ~* ^/gwgou/order/commdany {
        proxy_next_upstream error timeout http_503 http_504 http_502;
        proxy_connect_timeout 500s;
        proxy_read_timeout 500s;
        proxy_send_timeout 500s;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        rewrite  ^(.*)$  /order/commdany break;
        proxy_pass http://192.164.60.89:8089;
    }
}

For further reading, see related articles on Nginx access control, Kafka cluster deployment, Redis Sentinel setup, MySQL binlog recovery, and building a high‑availability Kubernetes cluster.