Expiration headers when rewriting requests

[Brian Kirkbride]

Hello,

I'm having trouble translating my setup into a working NginX config. 
Any help is much appreciated -- I'm almost there, but not quite.


I need to rewrite URLs like /r1234567/xyz... to be simply /xyz... to 
allow for versioned caching of resources (cache forever, change 
revision in URL to force cache update).

A simple rewrite rule works to find the resource, but I need to set 
the expiration headers to max for requests like this.  I tried doing this:

location ~ ^/r[0-9]+/ {
     expires max;
     add_header Last-Modified "Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT"
     rewrite ^/r[0-9]+(/.*)$ $1 last;
}

location / {
     # check for a cached file, fallback to FastCGI, etc
}

But this doesn't work because the rewrite seems to wipe out the 
headers when starting the request over.  I tried the rewrite with 
last, break and no flags -- nothing worked.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Brian