When i moved my blog to a [middleman](http://middlemanapp.com) system, i found that i needed to provide redirects from `/2012/01/25/some-post` to `/blog/2012/01/25/some-post`. It's a relatively simple task, though i lost some time because i missed a detail that no one usually explains.

There are articles on the web explaining how to do url rewriting in Nginx. Most of them will tell you something like this:

location /2009/ { rewrite ^(/2009/.*)$ /blog$1 break; }

In a gist, that's what you need. What they forget to mention is it will not work unless you provide the *root* in that *location* block.

Another thing you might want to do, to track eventual problems with your regular expression skills (hehe), is activate rewrite logging. It's also a good idea to inform clients that the resource moved permanently (301).

The full solution ended up being:

server { listen 80; server_name pedroassuncao.com *.pedroassuncao.com;

access_log /path/to/your/logs/nginx.access.log; error_log /path/to/your/logs/nginx.error.log;

rewrite_log on;

location /2009/ { root /path/to/your/html/; rewrite ^(/2009/.*)$ /blog$1 break; return 301; }

location / { root /path/to/your/html/; expires 24h; }

error_page 404 /404; }

A final note: When you activate `rewrite_log on;` nginx will dump all rewrite information to your *error* log as a notice. Since notice is the default it will show up. You can always make sure, by adding *notice* after the log file:

error_log /path/to/your/logs/nginx.error.log notice;

Happy nginxing :)