Nginx+FastCGI+Django Remove URL Prefix before passing to Django - django

Question

I've setup Nginx to fastcgi_pass to Django and don't want to serve Django from "/". I want to prefix the URLs with something like "/django/sample/" but then have Nginx remove that prefix before it gets passed to Django - this way Django's internals will act like it's actually serving from "/".
I've tried updating the Django app to include the prefix in the URLs routed, like this:
urlpatterns = patterns('',
'^', include(base_urlpatterns), # iff you wish to maintain the un-prefixed URL's too
'^your_prefix/', include(base_urlpatterns),
)
And I currently do a fastcgi_pass like so:
#django sample
location /django/sample {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8024;
}
But this isn't a graceful solution as any URL in my django app then has to make sure to include a prefix like "/django/sample". And it also means that when I run locally VS on the server the URLs may need to be different.
I build quite a few django apps that'll be running from one server and don't want to always have to do this tom-foolery with URLs and remember to update all the URLs in Django.
I've been googling for a while trying to figure out how to do this with nginx but haven't seen anything.
So, I'm looking to use Nginx to remove the "/django/sample" in the request before it gets passed to Django. Anyone done this before?

Answer 1

You're approaching this the wrong way round. There's no reason to remove the prefix before passing to Django: as long as you configure your server correctly, Django will be aware of it, and will automatically use it in things like the {% url %} tag and reverse() call (which of course you're using for all your URL references internally).
The documentation for deploying with FastCGI gives some details of how to set the prefix, in particular the advice that if you can't get it to work any other way, you can explicitly set FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME to the value of your prefix.