How to match question mark "?" as regexp on nginx.conf location

Question

I'd like to match question mark "?" as regexp on nginx.conf location.

For example, a URL pattern which I'd like to match is /something?foo=5 or /something?bar=8 (parameter only changeable).

Because nginx adopts RCPE, I can write the location on nginx.conf as follows:

location ~ ^/something\?.* {
}

The above doesn't match the URL pattern. How can I do that?

Also, the following is not my expectation.

location ~ ^/something?.* {
}

It'll match /something_foo_bar_buzz that I don't expect.

Answer 1

nginx location block doesn't match query string at all. So it's impossible.

Location

This directive allows different configurations depending on the URI.

In nginx, there is a built-in variable $uri, which the location block is matched against. For example, give a request

http://www.example.com/app/login.php?username=xyz&password=secret

the $uri value is this string:

 /app/login.php

and the query_string is stored in nginx variable $args:

username=xyz&password=secret

To do something wrt. query string, you can do something like

if ($args ~ username=xyz) {
   # do something for requests with this query string
}

But be careful, IF is Evil