Nginx location redirect regex not working

Question

I want to redirect requests to /images/someimage.png on my server to http://some.other.server/images/someimage.png . I have the following in my nginx config:

location ^/images/.*(png|jpg|gif)$ {
    rewrite ^/images/(.*)(png|jpg|gif)$ http://anotherserver.com/images/$1$2 redirect;
    return   302;
}

But for some reason it isn't getting hit when I request http://test.com/images/test.png (I just get a 404 because that file doesn't exist on myserver).

Answer 1

If i understand you correctly you want to 302 redirect /image/ url's on one server to the same path on another server. You can do that like so:

location /images/ {
  rewrite ^ $scheme://anotherserver.com$request_uri redirect;
}

you don't need the return 302 the rewrite ... redirect already does that (if you want 301 redirects instead use rewrite .... permanent )

you don't need regexes as long as you have the same url's on the other server either, the builtin variables will suffice

NOTE: The reason your location isn't getting hit is that you have location ^/images/.*(png|jpg|gif)$ instead of location ~ ^/images/.*(png|jpg|gif)$ . In other words you forgot to signal regex matching (with ~ for case-sensitive or ~* for case-insensitive)