NGINX - Rewrite version number in JS file name to parameter for PHP

Question

I had a rewrite from file.js?c=123 to file.js.php?c=123 but query params were downgrading my SEO evaluation. Actually, some proxy CDN do not cache query params.

server {
    location ~ \startscript.js$ {
        rewrite (.*) $1.php last;
    }
}

SO, I would like to rewrite file.123.js to file.js.php?c=123. Is that possible?

Answer 1

location ~ \startscript.js$ {

In regex the \s at the start of your uri is a shorthand character class that matches a single space (or "whitespace character"). So this is unlikely to have matched anything. However, you should backslash escape the literal dot before the file extension.

I assume "file" in file.js could be any file, it's not always "startscript"?

Try the following instead (UPDATED):

server {
    location ~ \.js$ {
        rewrite (.+)\.(\d+)\.js$ $1.js.php?c=$2 last;
    }
}

However, as I mentioned in comments, this makes no difference with regards to SEO (search engines handle the query string just fine - always have). In the past, it was possibly a usability issue, as some proxy servers did not cache based on the query string - so users might not have seen the correct content (if they were behind a proxy that behaved this way) - but this is historical AFAIK.

See also my answer to the following question:

• Tradeoffs around using a query string vs embedding version number in the CSS/JS files

---

... this is throwing 404 error, Eg: domain.com/startscript.82b4527379bd2540f79f532950c7b96b.js

The above example specifically matches digits only (as in your initial example). What you have there looks like a 32 char hex value (hash?). Try the following instead (UPDATED):

rewrite "(.+)\.([\da-f]{32})\.js$" $1.js.php?c=$2 last;

Or use the the more generic \w+, as @devnull suggested in comments, to match any "word" character (ie. 0-9, a-z, A-Z and _). Although with regex, it's generally advisable to be as specific as possible, so if it's always a 32 char hex then match a 32 char hex.