ngx: a TypeScript DSL for nginx config generation

imperfect tools for saving time

hi! i made a thing - it kind of sucks but it saves me lots of time.

a taste of ngx

so, just this month I moved my whole blog from its old domain to this one, but since i’d like to do my best to prevent link rot, i’d like to redirect all the pages to the new site!

there are a million ways to “serve http 3xx”, and i have half-invented countless solutions:

but I never finished any of these (despite making a bunch of progress on a lot of them). all I need to do right now is redirect from my old site to my new one. so let’s do it!

let’s say we have a site A.com and we want to redirect a handful of pages to the same route on B.com

in nginx, that would look something like this:

server {
  server_name a.com;

  listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/a.com/fullchain.pem;
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/a.com/privkey.pem;

  location = /a {
    # 302 ('Found') is a temporary redirect,
    # but you may want a different 3xx code.
    return 302 https://b.com/new-a;
  }
  location = /b {
    return 302 https://b.com/b;
  }
}

that’s a lot of typing!! how does it look with ngx?

here’s a script that you run with deno run and it spits out an nginx config (which you can put inside /etc/nginx/http.d/ or something): 

import ngx from "https://char.lt/ngx/v0.1/ngx.ts";

const redirects = {
  "/a": "https://b.com/new-a",
  "/b": "https://b.com/b-v2",
};

export const config = ngx("server", [
  [
    "server_name a.com",
    ...ngx.listen(),
    ...ngx.letsEncrypt("a.com")
  ],
  Object.entries(redirects).map(([path, uri]) =>
    ngx(`location = ${path}`, [
      `return 301 ${uri}`
    ])
  ),
]);

if (import.meta.main) console.log(config.build());

well, it’s a similar length - but this way, adding a new redirect goes from three lines to one short (& memorable) one!

 const redirects = {
   "/a": "https://b.com/new-a",
   "/b": "https://b.com/b-v2",
+  "/c": "https://b.com/my-c-replacement",
 };

plus, this is all using a fully-fledged programming language! you could add these from a for loop or something! here’s real code i have written for redirecting from the old som.codes website to this new one on char.lt: 

const blogPosts = [
  // just pasted in from browser address bar:
  "https://som.codes/blog/2019-07-12/transcoding-music/",
  "https://som.codes/blog/2019-12-07/deploying-static-sites/",
  "https://som.codes/blog/2019-12-30/jvm-hackery-noverify/",
  "https://som.codes/blog/2020-01-07/hide-signal-phone-numbers/",
  "https://som.codes/blog/2021-06-08/duo-mobile-hotp/",
  "https://som.codes/blog/2022-01-09/extract-multimc-msa-cid/",
];

for (let postUrl of blogPosts) {
  postUrl = postUrl.substring("https://som.codes/blog/".length);
  const matches = postUrl.match(/^(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})\/(.+)\//);
  if (matches == null) continue;
  const year = matches[1];
  const month = matches[2];
  const title = matches[4];
  redirects[`/blog/${postUrl}`] = `https://char.lt/blog/${year}/${month}/${title}/`;
}

ngx isn’t amazing

i still have to think about nginx configuration! it hasn’t solved all my problems.

because i didn’t take the time to write a proper DSL, i still have to check the docs for the right directive to put in a string literal, so it’s still possible to mess up some syntax or semantics of the config file which can cause nginx to fail to reload. this is kind of bad usability.

i also now have to run a build step for each config instead of just editing things in /etc/nginx/http.d/, and then after i’ve run the script i have to manually send its output to the correct file in the nginx config folder. this means i can potentially lose config sources (like, literally lose, like… where in the filesystem did i leave it?) or clobber the wrong thing. those are bad footguns!

BUT: i don’t have to type a site’s domain three times or remember the default letsencrypt live directory path ever again! it saves me time and i can improve it more later, but making this small thing is good incremental improvement for my workflow

choosing to not write a better tool

if i, at the outset, decided to make a perfect solution for nginx config, i likely would have burned a weekend and come away with nothing usable. so i made something kind of bad and i will make it better when it matters.

is there some computer chore you have that’s trivially partially-automated? what’s a minimal approach that can alleviate some boring work for you? i didn’t have to spend a bunch of time inventing something but i don’t dread nginx configuration anymore :)