Introducing nginx_accept_language

What does it do?

This module parses the Accept-Language header and gives the most suitable locale for the user from a list of supported locales from your website.

Why did I create it?

I’m using page caching with merb on a multi-lingual website and I needed a way to serve the correct language page from the cache For multi-lingual page caching see the cache branch of the merb_global fork at <http://github.com/giom/merb_global> , I’ll post a write-up about this later.

Syntax:

set_from_accept_language $lang en ja pl;

$lang is the variable in which to store the locale
en ja pl are the locales supported by your website

If none of the locales from accept_language is available on your website, it sets the variable to the first locale of your website’s supported locales (in this case en)

Caveat

It currently assumes that the accept-language is sorted by quality values (from my tests it’s the case for safari, firefox, opera and ie) and discards q (see <http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html>). In the situation where I’m using the module, this assumption works… but buyer beware :-)

Example configuration

If you have different subdomains for each languages

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your_domain.com;
    set_from_accept_language $lang en ja zh;
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://$lang.your_domain.com redirect;
}

Or you could do something like this, redirecting people coming to ’/’ to /en (or /pt)

location / {
    set_from_accept_language $lang pt en;
     if ( $request_uri ~ ^/$ ) {
       rewrite ^/$ /$lang redirect;
       break;
     }
}

Where to get it?

It’s available on github at http://github.com/giom/nginx_accept_language_module

Installation

Download the module source from github: http://github.com/giom/nginx_accept_language_module or clone it with git clone git://github.com/giom/nginx_accept_language_module.git

Unpack, and then compile nginx with:

`./configure --add-module=path/to/nginx_accept_language_module`

I’m currently available for hire on a contract basis.

Guillaume Maury's Ramblings