I know 'if' is evil, and in general shouldn't be used inside a location block, but I needed this ability as well and have been using the following without any trouble for a couple years.

upstream app_servers { server localhost:3000; }

server {

# set proxy settings here (not allowed in 'if') proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;

location / { if ($request_method = POST) { proxy_pass http://app_servers; break; } try_files $uri @app; }

location @app { proxy_pass http://app_servers; }

}

If anyone has any better ideas, I'd love to hear them. So far, I haven't been able to find any without having to patch the source.

While we're on the topic, I know there's been talk of allowing POST requests to static files, but I don't remember a clear behavior being defined. When added to nginx, will this simply serve the static file as though a GET request was made? Ideally, one would be able to specify that POST requests should always be proxied to an upstream (which is what my config above does).

Maybe something like this in the config:

# handle just like a GET request allow_static_post on;

# proxy to upstream allow_static_post proxy_pass http://app_servers;

I don't use FCGI or PHP, so I'm not sure how the config would look for those, but you get the idea.