Nginx HTTP Server - Fourth Edition

Directives accept specific syntaxes

You may indeed stumble upon complex syntaxes that can be confusing at first sight:

rewrite ^/(.*)\.(png|jpg|gif)$ /image.php? file=$1&format=$2 last;  

Syntaxes are directive-specific. While the root directive only accepts a simple character string defining the folder containing files that should be served for a website, the location block or the rewrite directive support complex expressions in order to match particular patterns. Some other directives, such as listen, accept up to 17 different parameters. Syntaxes will be explained along with directives in their respective chapters.

Later on, we will detail a module (the rewrite module) which allows for a much more advanced logical structure through the ...