Understanding and exploring the location block

We have established that NGINX lets you fine-tune your configuration down to three levels—at the protocol level (the http block), the server level (the server block), and the requested URI level (the location block). Let’s now go into more detail about the third one.

Location modifier

NGINX allows you to define location blocks by specifying a pattern that will be matched against the requested document URI:

server {
    server_name website.com;
    location /admin/ {
    # The configuration you place here only applies to
    # http://website.com/admin/
    }
}

Instead of a simple folder name, you can indeed insert complex patterns. The syntax of the location block is shown here:

location [=|~|~*|^~|@] pattern { … }

The first optional argument is a symbol called location that will define the way NGINX matches...