Dynamic Developer Environments with Nginx

Did you ever want multiple developer environments without ever changing URLs? Nginx can help you. Unlike Apache, Nginx can be configuered very dynamically. You can use map to map cookie values to document roots.

map $cookie_environment $environment {
    default  production;
    feature  feature;
    develop  development;
}

You can use the $environment variable then in paths to root. You can also add a second map and map different environments to different ports of a fastcgi_pass directive.

server {
    listen 80;

    server_name example.localhost;
    index index.html;

    root /var/www/example/$environment;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

To switch environments easily in your browser, you can add bookmarks. It may not be that known, but bookmarks can be used to execute JavaScript. Simply add a new bookmark, click edit, and change the URL to something like the following:

javascript:document.cookie = "environment=feature; path=/"; window.location.reload();

This will change your current environment and automatically reload the page. You can add a new bookmark for each environment that you have.

Complete Example

map $cookie_environment $environment {
    default  production;
    feature  feature;
    develop  development;
}

server {
    listen 80;

    server_name example.localhost;
    index index.html;

    root /var/www/example/$environment;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

I hope this has been helpful. I would be glad if somebody could point out a similar configuration for Apache, even if it’s a bit more complicated.