The location directive

[Thomas Love]

Hello list

I am new to nginx. I put it into production a couple of weeks ago, and I
have been very pleased with its efficiency and stability. But I have
been wondering about an aspect of the location directive. The only previous
discussion I have found of this went dead without resolution (
http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,4225)

By way of illustration, this motif was my first attempt at a configuration,
and I suspect -- assuming I am not unusually dense -- that others coming
from Apache will have tried it too:

server {
        listen          80;
        root            /www/;

location ~ \.php$  {
                fastcgi_pass    unix:php.sock;
}

        location ~* \.(ico|flv|swf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|wav)$ {
                expires max;
        }

        location /secrets/  {
          auth_basic            "Restricted";
          auth_basic_user_file  /path/to/.htpasswd;
        }

        location /local-secrets/ {
          allow 127.0.0.1;
          deny all;
        }
}

...and I'm aware that it's dangerously wrong. Compounding this is the fact
that it looks - to me at least - intuitively correct. Perhaps I expected the
location parser to be more promiscuous. The second problem is my solution:

server {
        listen          80;
        root            /www/;

location ~ \.php$  {
                fastcgi_pass    unix:php.sock;
}

        location ~* \.(ico|flv|swf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|wav)$ {
                expires max;
        }

        location ^~ /secrets/  {
          auth_basic            "Restricted";
          auth_basic_user_file  /path/to/.htpasswd;
  location ~ \.php$  {
                fastcgi_pass    unix:php.sock;
  }
          location ~* \.(ico|flv|swf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|wav)$ {
                expires max;
          }
        }

        location ^~ /local-secrets/ {
          allow 127.0.0.1;
          deny all;
  location ~ \.php$  {
                fastcgi_pass    unix:php.sock;
  }
          location ~* \.(ico|flv|swf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|wav)$ {
                expires max;
          }
        }
}

...which is unwieldy, at the least. Is it correct? Is it optimal? Is it wise
to nest these locations? (Would it get more bloated not to?)

My main question is -- assuming that the answers to the above are yes -- is
there a configuration available or planned that's as simple as this:

server {
        listen          80;
        root            /www/;

*location continue* ~ \.php$  {
                fastcgi_pass    unix:php.sock;
}

        *location continue* ~* \.(ico|flv|swf|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|wav)$
{
                expires max;
        }

        location /public-secrets/  {
          auth_basic            "Restricted";
          auth_basic_user_file  /path/to/.htpasswd;
        }

        location /private-secrets/ {
          allow 127.0.0.1;
          deny all;
        }
}

By "location continue" I mean the parser to continue matching (sibling)
locations after a positive match on those expressions. The order of matching
would be the same. Is this / will this be possible?


Thomas
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