Serving an iPhone website with nginx

[Jonathan Vanasco]

thanks!

this actually has a lot of good ideas in it applicable to other  
solutions

On Jan 12, 2009, at 6:31 PM, Nick Pearson wrote:

> 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.
>
>