Nginx HTTP Server - Third Edition

The location block

We have established that Nginx offers you the possibility to fine-tune your configuration down to three levels—at the protocol level (http block), the server level (server block), and the requested URI level (location block). Let us now detail the latter.

Location modifier

Nginx allows you to define location blocks by specifying a pattern that will be matched against the requested document URI.

server {
    server_name website.com;
    location /admin/ {
    # The configuration you place here only applies to
    # http://website.com/admin/
    }
}

Instead of a simple folder name, you can indeed insert complex patterns. The syntax of the location block is:

location [=|~|~*|^~|@] pattern { ... }

The first optional argument is a symbol called location modifier ...