Hi all,

Discovered Nginx a few weeks back. After some experimenting I have come to the
conclusion that Nginx really is very very good.

I have a small feature request:

I have a set of static files (html and others) which I want to make available only from a certain date/time. Inspired by the rewrite module, this morning I thought of a simple method to control access to such files.

My idea was to set the file creation/modification time of the static files in the future, i.e. the date/time from which they can be made available (e.g. I could use the touch tool to set the appropriate date/time). I could then do something like

if (!-f $request_filename) {return 404;} if ($date_gmt < fct($request_filename)) {return 403;}

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to get at the file creation/modification time (please do let me know if I overlooked something). The 'fct' in my example is an imaginary function which returns the file creation time in the same format as $date_gmt (presumably unix epoch timestamp)

An even better way to handle this would be to have a directive in the core module which disallows serving files which have a creation/modification time in the future. I could then use:

location /ftc/ { filetime_check on; }

to disallow serving of files with a filetime in the future for that location.
Files would then automatically become available once the request time >=
filetime. This way access to certain files could be controlled in a very
straightforward and transparent way - and with a simple 'touch'.

Though I'd definitely prefer a directive for the above purpose, access to file creation/modification time (through variable or function) could still be useful in the rewriting or ssi module.

Anyone any other suggestions ?

Thanks,

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