Can a http request be sent with the nginx location directive?

Question

Maybe this is trivial, but I haven't found anything meaningful or I didn't know where to look...

(How) is it possible to to send a curl / whatever command as soon as a certain path is requested?

Something along these lines, but that would actually work:

location / {
curl --data 'v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-XXXXXXXX-X&cid=123&dp=hit'  https://google-analytics.com/collect
}

Answer 1

(as pointed out in the comments), ngx_http_lua_module can do it!

location / {
          access_by_lua_block  {
            os.execute("/usr/bin/curl --data 'v=1&t=pageview&tid=UA-XXXXXXXX-X&cid=123&dp=hit'  https://google-analytics.com/collect >/dev/null 2>/dev/null") 
        }
}

note that the execution halts the pageload until curl has finished. to run curl in the background and continue the pageload immediately, add a space and an & to the end so it looks like

>/dev/null 2>/dev/null &")