how to process dynamic urls as static pages using nginx? - mod-rewrite

Question

I want my Nginx serve dynamical urls as static pages, e.g.
given a url "/book?name=ruby_lang&published_at=2014" ,
the nginx will serve a static file (which is generated automatically ) named as:
"book?name=ruby_lang&published_at=2014.html" or:
"book-name-eq-ruby_lang-pblished_at-eq-2014.html"
is this possible?
NOTE:
1.there's no static file named:
"book?name=ruby_lang&published_at=2014.html" nor
"book-name-eq-ruby_lang-pblished_at-eq-2014.html"
however, I can generate them if needed.
2.I can't change the url that give to the consumer. e.g. my consumer could only send request to me via
"/book?name=ruby_lang&published_at=2014"
but not with any other urls.

Answer 1

If you are OK with generating the HTML files yourself, you could simply use nginx's rewrite module. Example:
rewrite ^/book book-name-eq-$arg_name-published_at-eq-$arg_published_at.html last;
If you need to make sure that name and published_at are valid, you can instead do something like this:
location = /book {
if ($arg_name !~ "^[A-Za-z\d_-]+$") { return 404; }
if ($arg_published_at !~ "^\d{4}$") { return 404; }
rewrite ^/book book-name-eq-$arg_name-published_at-eq-$arg_published_at.html last;
}
This will make sure that published_at is a valid 4-digits integer, and name is a valid identifier (English alphabets, numbers, underscore, and hyphen).
To make sure a book is only accessible from one URL, you should throw 404 if the URL is the HTML file. Add this before the previous rule:
location ~ /book-(.*).html {
return 404;
}

Answer 2

OK, thanks to #Alon Gubkin's help, finally I solved this problem, (see : http://siwei.me/blog/posts/nginx-try-files-and-rewrite-tips) .here are some tips:
use 'try_files' instead of 'rewrite'
use '-' instead of underscore '_' in your static file names, otherwise nginx would get confused when setting $arg_parameters to your file name. e.g. use "platform-$arg_platform.json' instead of "platform_$arg_platform.json"
take a look at nginx built-in variables.
and this is my nginx config snippet:
server {
listen 100;
charset utf-8;
root /workspace/test_static_files;
index index.html index.htm;
# nginx will first search '/platform-$arg_platform...' file,
# if not found return /defautl.json
location /popup_pages {
try_files /platform-$arg_platform-product-$arg_product.json /default.json;
}
}
also I put my code on github so that someone interested in this issue could take a look:
https://github.com/sg552/server_dynamic_urls_as_static_files