mihm / nginx_accept_language_module

Parse the Accept-Language header and sets a variable to a language you support that your user can understand

Nginx Accept Language module

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.

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; } }

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
I’ll soon put an example on http://gom-jabbar.org

Bugs

Send Bugs to Guillaume Maury ([email protected])

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Evan Miller for his guide on writing nginx modules (http://emiller.info/nginx-modules-guide.html)