Today a good old friend, Alex, sent me a “Bat signal” asking for help with an unusual NGINX configuration, I wonder why my friends only remembers me during “weird” incidents :P

Basically the requirement was to run a multiple copies of a legacy application on the same URL as it does not support folder prefix or subdomains. The desired functionality was that /app1 configures nginx to use backend1 and return to /, and all the subsequent requests on / should be sent to backend1, the same with /app2 to backend2 and /app3 to backend3.

So the solution we designed is:

A request to http://server/app1, sets a cookie to be used for backend selection, and redirect to /. subsequent requests to /, will use the cookie value and select the backend based on it.

So on this example it was used a combination of map, regexp named matches and cookies using NGINX.

The configuration below achieves this functionality, mapping /app[0-9] to specific backend listed on the map { }

Thanks!