How do i configure nginx to redirect to a url for robots.txt & sitemap.xml

Question

I am running nginx 0.6.32 as a proxy front-end for couchdb. I have my robots.txt in the database, reachable as http://www.example.com/prod/_design/mydesign/robots.txt. I also have my sitemap.xml which is dynamically generated, on a similar url.

I have tried the following config:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name example.com;
  location / {
  if ($request_method = DELETE) {
    return 444;
  }
  if ($request_uri ~* "^/robots.txt") {
    rewrite ^/robots.txt http://www.example.com/prod/_design/mydesign/robots.txt permanent;
  }

  proxy-pass http://localhost:5984;
  proxy_redirect off;
  proxy_set_header Host $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
}

This appears to work as a redirect but is there a simpler way?

Answer 1

Or you can put it simply in its own location -

location /robots.txt {
    alias /Directory-containing-robots-file/robots.txt;
} 

Answer 2

I think you want to setup a location. The key part being the "=" directive.

location = /robots.txt {
    alias /your_full_path/robots.txt ;
}

(When I didn't include the =, it still went to the default nginx root location)

Setting it like below, would cause all /robots.txt* requests to be read out of /var/foo. So /robots.txt.bing tries reading /var/foo/robots.txt.bing off of disk. The "^~" indicates that it is a regular expression match on the beginning of the request.

location ^~ /robots.txt {
    root /var/foo;
}

Answer 3

rewrite with http://... is inteded to do the redirect. You are probably looking for:

rewrite ^/robots.txt /prod/_design/mydesign/robots.txt last;

Answer 4

This should work also, and may perform slightly better.

location /robots.txt { alias /var/www/django/mysite/static/robots.txt; }

Answer 5

Note that the first parameter is a regular expression so you should probably escape . and match end of line.

location / {
    rewrite ^/robots\.txt$ /static/robots.txt last;
    ...
}

NginxHttpRewriteModule

Answer 6

Considering that robots.txt is located at /var/www/mysite/static/robots.txt, the following worked for me:

location = /robots.txt {
    root /var/www/mysite/static/;
}