How to reference a file in my nginx.conf

Question

There is an example in the Nginx Beginner's Guide 1 that shows how to redirect requests for certain file types to a specific location:

location ~ \.(gif|jpg|png)$ {
    root /data/images;
}

Suppose I wanted to do this for a list of maybe a hundred different file extensions. It would be really ugly to write it all in that same line. Is there a way I can read the conditional argument in from a file?

External file FILE_EXTENTIONS.txt:

txt
data
jpg
mp3
midi
png
xml
csv
...

And then in my nginx.conf:

location ~ \.(open(FILE_EXTENSIONS.txt))
    root /data/images;
}

The main thing is I want to be able to read from a long list inside the nginx.conf

Answer 1

So it turns out it is as simple as including the file at the top and the config file automatically inherited the variables/directives.

For example:

include filetype.rules;