Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

Internal requests

Nginx differentiates external and internal requests. External requests originate directly from the client; the URI is then matched against possible location blocks:

server { 
    server_name website.com; 
    location = /document.html { 
        deny all; # example directive 
    } 
} 

A client request to http://website.com/document.html would directly fall into the preceding location block.

Opposite to this, internal requests are triggered by Nginx via specific directives. Among the directives offered by the default Nginx modules, there are several directives capable of producing internal requests: error_page, index, rewrite, try_files, add_before_body, and add_after_body (from the addition module), the include SSI command, and more.

There are ...