Nginx location “not equal to” regex

Question

How do I set a location condition in Nginx that responds to anything that isn't equal to the listed locations?

I tried:

location !~/(dir1|file2\.php) {
   rewrite ^/(.*) http://example.com/$1 permanent;
}

But it doesn't trigger the redirect. It simply handles the requested URI using the rules in the rest of the server configuration.

Answer 1

i was looking for the same. and found this solution.

Use negative regex assertion:

location ~ ^/(?!(favicon\.ico|resources|robots\.txt)) { 
.... # your stuff 
} 

Source Negated Regular Expressions in location

Answer 2

According to nginx documentation

there is no syntax for NOT matching a regular expression. Instead, match the target regular expression and assign an empty block, then use location / to match anything else

So you could define something like

location ~ (dir1|file2\.php) { 
    # empty
}

location / {
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://example.com/$1 permanent; 
}

Answer 3

Suppose you have two locations say, location1 and location2, you can try following location block configuration to solve your problem.

 location ~ ^/(location1|location2) {
      rewrite (.*) http://example.com/$1 permanent; 
 }

Also the problem you are facing could be because of the sequence of multiple location block in your configuration. Please check, In case any of the location block that comes before this, serves the request.