nginx - read custom header from upstream server

88
votes

I am using nginx as a reverse proxy and trying to read a custom header from the response of an upstream server (Apache) without success. The Apache response is the following:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2012 20:18:29 GMT 
Server: Apache/2.2.17 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.5-1ubuntu7.10
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
My-custom-header: 1

I want to read the value from My-custom-header and use it in a if clause:

location / {
    // ...
    // get My-custom-header value here
    // ...
}

Is this possible? Thanks in advance.

3
nginxreverse-proxy

3 Answers

103
votes

$http_name_of_the_header_key

i.e if you have origin = domain.com in header, you can use $http_origin to get "domain.com"

In nginx does support arbitrary request header field. In the above example last part of a variable name is the field name converted to lower case with dashes replaced by underscores

Reference doc here: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#var_http_

For your example the variable would be $http_my_custom_header.

55
votes

I was facing the same issue. I tried both $http_my_custom_header and $sent_http_my_custom_header but it did not work for me.

Although solved this issue by using $upstream_http_my_custom_header.

10
votes

Use $http_MY_CUSTOM_HEADER

You can write some-thing like

set my_header $http_MY_CUSTOM_HEADER;
if($my_header != 'some-value') {
#do some thing;
}