Avoiding duplication of directives for different locations?

Question

The following rules duplicate the proxy directives and I would prefer to only mention them once:

location /view/ {
    # Duplicated!
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9292;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

location /api/ {
    # Duplicated!
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9292;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;

    auth_basic "esqulino Testbetrieb";
    auth_basic_user_file /srv/svn/users.conf;
}

There are more locations then the ones that I have mentioned here, so specifying the proxy directives globally is not an option.

My naive approach was to simply extend the first location with a regex, mention the proxy there and then only specifying the auth section for the API:

location ~ /(api|view)/ {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9292;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
}

location /api/ {
    auth_basic "esqulino Testbetrieb";
    auth_basic_user_file /srv/svn/users.conf;
}

But for some reason this does not trigger the authentication at all.

How could I mention the proxy (or actually any) directives only once for a set of locations and still "overload" some more specific locations with additional directives like auth_basic?

Answer 1

your problem is explained in the nginx documentation. only one of those locations is used, they are not merged together:

To find location matching a given request, nginx first checks locations defined using the prefix strings (prefix locations). Among them, the location with the longest matching prefix is selected and remembered. Then regular expressions are checked, in the order of their appearance in the configuration file. The search of regular expressions terminates on the first match, and the corresponding configuration is used. If no match with a regular expression is found then the configuration of the prefix location remembered earlier is used. (http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#location)

as an alternative you could use an include and move the duplicated config lines to another file - for example below /etc/nginx/snippets/

EDIT The idea with nested locations from our comments:

Though I am not sure this is 100% correct as I did not test it, yet, try something like this:

location ~ /(view|api) {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:9292;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;

    location /api/ {
        auth_basic "esqulino Testbetrieb";
        auth_basic_user_file /srv/svn/users.conf;
    }
}

Another option might be to use if ($uri ~ ^/api) within the regex-location