Nginx - Serve static html content with whitespace in filename

I use this setting to serve static html files:

server {
    root /var/www/static_html;
    index index.html index.htm;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/index.html $uri.html =404;
        autoindex on;
    }
}

Now if a filename contains whitespace "spam spam.html" the response is "404 Not Found"

In the access.log:

"GET /spam%20spam.html HTTP/1.1" 404

Is it possible to serve these files?

Solution 1:

I bumped into the same issue when trying to setup NGINX to serve WebP files from the same filename as JPG/PNG's and certain files were containing spaces. The reason why it happens like this is:

• space cannot be used inside of an URL and browsers replace it automatically inside the URL with %20, as you might be aware​
• the $uri variable in this case will contain the link with %20 as you can see from the logs
• when NGINX is looking for the file with %20 in its name on the disk, it will not find it, because on disk it is stored with space and not with %20, therefore it will result in a 404.

A potential way of getting this to work is to do a replacement of the %20 with a space and the only way of achieving this that comes to my mind is to use something like OpenRestly's Lua NGINX Module:

https://github.com/openresty/lua-nginx-module​​

Then, after this is properly installed and configured (not very easy!), you might try something like this, just before try_files:

access_by_lua_block {
        ngx.var.uri = string.gsub(ngx.var.uri, "%20", " ")
}

This isn't actually tested, it's just an idea. If there are better ways to achieve this, I'm open to check them! ​​