How this site does userdirs in nginx

(update: as of april 2023 this is out of date, see my co-admin's post about how she changed this)

If you can't tell, this site has user dir pages (that is, /~elle/notebook.html reads from the file /home/elle/public_html/notebook.html). I've spent a while tweaking the nginx server config for this, and I think I'm reasonably happy with the results:

(if you just want to steal the code, it's at the bottom)

this matches against the location /~(thing)(optional path)

this sets the filepath root to / instead of your nginx server dir

this tries in order, the path in the url as given, and then (path).html, which lets you access pages without specifying the html extension. If neither of these match a file, it loads the @redirect location, which:

redirects the user with a 301 (permanent redirect) to the url with a trailing slash, which will then match:

this location, which is used to handle directories.

this sets the filepath root to / instead of your nginx server dir

which then tries to load (directory)/index.html, then, failing that, returns a 404.

This does a few nice things:

• You can access files without a .html extension
• Directories always have the / extension, so you can use relative links in index.html pages properly
• It's all automatic through your directory structure

The full code is given below. I give no guarantees this will work, do anything, not compromise your entire system, etc.

location @redirect {
	return 301 $request_uri/;
}

# automatically load index.html for directories accessed through dir/
location ~ ^/~(.+?)(/.*)?/$ {
	try_files /home/$1/public_html$2/index.html =404;
}

# load files, or redirect to dir/ if there's no specific file
location ~ ^/~(.+?)(/.*)?$ {
	try_files /home/$1/public_html$2 /home/$1/public_html$2.html @redirect;
}