I have a http-only and secure (ssl) cookie, and I want nginx to check whether this cookie exists in a request, if not, reject it by serving a 404 page. This is just a preliminary check, so I don't care about the actual value in the cookie.

So far I've tried this: if ($http_cookie !~* "cookie_name=[.]+") { return 404; } in a location directive, but despite the cookie is contained in the requests, 404 is returned. What should be corrected here? Thanks!