Configuring nginx to return a 404 when a URL matches a pattern

Question

I want nginx to return a 404 code when it receives a request which matches a pattern, e.g., /test/*. How can I configure nginx to do that?

Answer 1

location ^~ /test/ {
    internal;
}

Answer 2

location /test/ {
  return 404;
}

Answer 3

Need to add "^~" to give this match a higher priority than regex location blocks.

location ^~ /test/ {
  return 404;
}

Otherwise you will be in some tricky situation. For example, if you have another location block such as

location ~ \.php$ {
  ...
}

and someone sends a request to http://your_domain.com/test/bad.php, that regex location block will be picked by nginx to serve the request. Obviously it's not what you want. So be sure to put "^~" in that location block!

Reference: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location