Serving an iPhone website with nginx

[Nick Pearson]

The reason I did this at the web server level rather than at the application
level is that the Rails app I have running behind nginx is a generalized
content management system.  I could have built in the capabilities necessary
to handle this into the CMS, but then I wouldn't be able to take advantage
of the web server-level caching.  The nice thing about my solution is that
it doesn't matter what is behind nginx -- it could be a simple site made up
of nothing but static files with no app at all.  It was this simplicity (and
ignorance on the part of the app) that I was going for.

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 4:40 PM, mike <mike503 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Nick Pearson <nick.pearson at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > While recently working on an iPhone website, I found I had some seemingly
> > common requirements but couldn't find any good write-ups on how to serve
> > such a site with nginx.  While it's of course just a "normal" website, I
> > wanted to redirect iPhone users to an optimized version of the site while
> > still allowing them to get back to the full site if necessary.  I also
> > needed to serve two versions of the same page from a mobile-optimized
> > website for the same URL (an iPhone version and a standard mobile
> version,
> > based on user agent) while allowing each version of the page to be cached
> > independently.
>
> I would just do this in the application (PHP, etc.) level.
>
> You could in theory do something funky with user agents in nginx and
> do some rewrites or proxy to something else, or try to leverage the
> XSL/XML capabilities nginx has. Otherwise I see no reason for nginx to
> be invovled in this and would suggest to everyone to do this kind of
> work in the application layer.
>
>
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