location

Syntax: location [ = | ~ | ~* | ^~ ] uri { ... }
location @name { ... }
Default:    —
Context:    server, location

Sets configuration depending on a request URI.

The matching is performed against a normalized URI, after decoding the text encoded in the %XX form, resolving references to relative path components . and .., and possible compression of two or more adjacent slashes into a single slash.

A location can either be defined by a prefix string, or by a regular expression. Regular expressions are specified with the preceding ~* modifier (for case-insensitive matching), or the ~ modifier (for case-sensitive matching).

To find location matching a given request, nginx first checks locations defined using the prefix strings (prefix locations). Among them, the location with the longest matching prefix is selected and remembered. Then regular expressions are checked, in the order of their appearance in the configuration file. The search of regular expressions terminates on the first match, and the corresponding configuration is used. If no match with a regular expression is found then the configuration of the prefix location remembered earlier is used.

If the longest matching prefix location has the ^~ modifier then regular expressions are not checked.

Also, using the = modifier it is possible to define an exact match of URI and location. If an exact match is found, the search terminates. For example, if a / request happens frequently, defining location = / will speed up the processing of these requests, as search terminates right after the first comparison. Such a location cannot obviously contain nested locations.

Let’s illustrate the above by an example:

location = / {
    [ configuration A ]
}

location / {
    [ configuration B ]
}

location /documents/ {
    [ configuration C ]
}

location ^~ /images/ {
    [ configuration D ]
}

location ~* \.(gif|jpg|jpeg)$ {
    [ configuration E ]
}

• The “/” request will match configuration A.
• The “/index.html” request will match configuration B.
• The “/documents/document.html” request will match configuration C.
• The “/images/1.gif” request will match configuration D.
• The “/documents/1.jpg” request will match configuration E.

The @ prefix defines a named location. Such a location is not used for a regular request processing, but instead used for request redirection. They cannot be nested, and cannot contain nested locations.

If a location is defined by a prefix string that ends with the slash character, and requests are processed by one of proxy_pass, fastcgi_pass, uwsgi_pass, scgi_pass, memcached_pass, or grpc_pass, then the special processing is performed. In response to a request with URI equal to this string, but without the trailing slash, a permanent redirect with the code 301 will be returned to the requested URI with the slash appended. If this is not desired, an exact match of the URI and location could be defined like this:

location /user/ {
    proxy_pass http://user.example.com;
}

location = /user {
    proxy_pass http://login.example.com;
}