exclude url from rewrite

Question

I have set my nginx server to redirect all traffic from http to https. Now I need to have one url accessible from http. Here is my nginx config:

server {
    listen 80 default;
    server_name www.example.com example.com;


    location /example_page/ {
            return 301 http://$server_name/example_page/;
    }

    rewrite ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
}

But this won't work.

Answer 1

You can define rules for whole site and excluded url:

server {
  server_name example.com;
  listen 80;
  ...  
  # redirect any http url to https
  location / {
    return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
  }

  # but no redirect for this particular location:
  location /example_page/ {
    # usual site rules here (php handler etc)
  }        
}