Understanding locations (multiple locations that do different things)

[Igor Sysoev]

On 08 Apr 2015, at 08:00, E.B. <emailbuilder88 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I'm new to Nginx, coming from Apache. Now I'm struggling with
> how to apply multiple configs and rules to different location (request
> tyeps).
> 
> Easy example, a server/site has PHP support for all of its requests
> but only one of its directoryies needs to have HTTP AUTH.
> 
> I had:
> 
> location ~* \.php$ {...PHP settings...}
> location /admin {...HTTP AUTH settings...}
> 
> After reading about locations now I understand that ONLY ONE gets used.
> Which means PHP was working fine but HTTP AUTH was only protecting
> the non-PHP files in /admin! Am I correct?
> 
> I know I can nest location blocks but when I tested, it doesn't look like
> the settings in the outer block are inherited by the inner block, so the
> only advantage to nesting is just narrowing the request type handled by
> the block.
> 
> For example, if I nest "location /admin" inside the PHP block I still have
> to repeat the entire PHP setup parameters inside the /admin block. Plus
> I still need another /admin block outside the PHP block to have HTTP
> AUTH on the non-PHP files in /admin. This gets repetative and messy.
> 
> So what's the most smoothe way to have one or more location handlers
> that need to be *addative* like having a global handler for PHP files in
> addition to handlers that are specific to the directory, like HTTP AUTH
> or other things?

Additive locations are good when you want to make little configurations
even lesser. However, when such configurations grow their maintenance becomes
a nightmare - you have to look though all configuration to see how a tiny
change will affect entire configuration. People want not to write less but
they want to spend less time. These are different things. With right nginx
configuration you should write more but you will spend much less time
when you will change your configuration. So the recommended way to configure
your task is following:

...all common PHP setting...

location /admin {
    ...AUTH settings...

    location ~* \.php$ {
       ...AUTH PHP settings...
    }
}

location ~* \.php$ {
    ...generic PHP settings...
}

You can also look my presentation on this topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWRYbLKsS0I
http://sysoev.ru/tmp/nginx.conf.2014.16x9.pdf


-- 
Igor Sysoev
http://nginx.com