Disable SSL for certain paths in Nginx

Question

I have a Web site where I want all requests to be done with HTTPS except for requests to urls with paths that start with /foo/. How do I configure this in Nginx?

Right now I run all requests with SSL:

server {
    listen 443;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /home/admin/ssl/ssl.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /home/admin/ssl/ssl.key;

    server_name www.mydomain.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
        ...
    }
}

Answer 1

Add a second server entry for non-ssl, port 80, serving /foo/* and redirecting everything else to HTTPS URL.

Maybe something like this?:

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

    location ~ ^/(foo|foo/.*)$ {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8000;
        ... 
    }

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