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accept-language: NGINX Accept-Language module

Installation

You can install this module in any RHEL-based distribution, including, but not limited to:

  • RedHat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, 9
  • CentOS 7, 8, 9
  • AlmaLinux 8, 9
  • Rocky Linux 8, 9
  • Amazon Linux 2 and Amazon Linux 2023
yum -y install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
yum -y install nginx-module-accept-language

Enable the module by adding the following at the top of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

load_module modules/ngx_http_accept_language_module.so;

This document describes nginx-module-accept-language v1.0.0 released on Oct 30 2018.

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

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Evan Miller for his guide on writing nginx modules.

GitHub

You may find additional configuration tips and documentation for this module in the GitHub repository for nginx-module-accept-language.