Nginx - regex location

Question

So I have a regex-based location rule, something like this:

location ~ /(abc.*xyz|def.*zxy|ghk.*qwe)/

Can I check which part of regex yielded the match? Meaning that if the url was like

/12abc34/

Than I'd like to know that it was matched by

.*abc.*

Is there a way?

I'm running latest nginx compiled with lua-module on a Debian VM on AWS.

------------Update-------------

I'm thinking to use inner location, but it will be ugly:

 location ~ /(abc.*xyz|def.*zxy|ghk.*qwe)/
{
    location ~ /(abc.*xyz){...}
    location ~ /(def.*zxy){...}
...
}

Right now I have like 60 regex patterns. Is such approach ok?

Have you considered using map with $request_uri? See this document for details. — Richard Smith
– Richard Smith, Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 15:23

Richard Smith · Accepted Answer · 2016-11-27 14:21:46Z

1

Your regular expression expression: /(.*abc.*|.*def.*|.*ghk.*)/ can be reduced to:

location ~ (abc|def|ghk).*/ { ... }

As any nginx URI begins with a /, you do not need to test for /.*.

The part of the regular expression within parentheses is captured as $1 within the location block.

So in the case of /12abc34/, the variable $1 would be set to abc.

answered Nov 27, 2016 at 14:21

Richard Smith

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1 Comment

Ok, but I also have rules like (xyz.*abc). The solution you offered unfortunatelly will not work for this :(