nginx

knowing the geolocation of your site’s users is handy thing. maybe you want to force your canadian users into a degraded, second-rate version of your ecommerce site, or maybe you want to redirect people from brazil to a frontend you ran through google translate, or maybe you just want to block the netherlands because you hate the dutch. there are reasons.

traditionally, this gets done by calling a third-party geolocation api. you gotta fiddle with api keys and manage rate limits and write a bunch of code. or… we could just let nginx do it all for us.

in this post we’re going to go over how to do ip geolocation for country and city in nginx and get that data into our web app where we can use it. all of this was written for ubuntu-like systems runing nginx 1.18.0.

the problem is this: we have a bunch of files, pdfs say, on our webserver that we want people to download, but only if they’re registered users. everyone else gets 404s.

there’s no shortage of ways to homeroll a solution to this issue (i often use private s3 buckets), but perhaps the most elegant way is to configure nginx to do it for us. no vendor lock in with aws, no controller methods struggling under the weight of 50mb pdfs; just nginx serving files.

in this post, we’re going to go over how to use the nginx‘s X-Accel-Redirect header with a light sprinking of php to serve files from a restricted directory.