I have some websites published on public ip, for accessibility, but for my customers internal, private, use.
For this websites we don’t need search engines indexing.
But every time that I upload to remote new version, I delete robots.txt
and, sometime, I forget to rewrite it.
We don’t need indexing so robots.txt is a very, very complex file, simply stop all crawler …
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
So why not serve it directly from nginx? without add real file?
After a little I found a good example on serverfault and I modified all my nginx server blocks:
server {
listen myport;
root /my/www/root;
server_name your.site.dot
...
location = /robots.txt {
add_header Content-Type text/plain;
return 200 "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /\n";
}
...
}
… now we can delete robots.txt
from my web root and test it.
tips
to test remember to disable browser cache or usecurl -v https://your.site.dot/robots.txt