Thank you for your explanation! Your solution is much elegant!

I have a follow up on this. Since the redirect is used for "issue
redirect for some reason (e.g. directory redirect to add trailing
slash).", then, supposedly i can do this:

location ~ ^/download/.*$ {
# the rewrite works!
rewrite ^ http://example.com:7788$request_uri?;
}

It works! :) Thank you! Now the site is running on deafutl port 80.
Users won't notice the download is through port 7788 unless they look
at the header. Much better!

> You misunderstood wiki.  It says "nginx will use first value ...
> for redirects", but it doesn't say anything about "all request
> will be redirected".  Server name will be only used if nginx
> would issue redirect for some reason (e.g. directory redirect to
> add trailing slash).




> Note well: using port in server_name doesn't make sense as nginx
> only match hostname part of a request's Host header against it.
> Distinction between different ports is made at socket level.
>
> If you want all requests to port 80 to be redirected to port 7788
> you should write something like this:
>
>    server {
>        listen 80;
>        server_name example.com;
>        rewrite ^ http://example.com:7788$request_uri?;
>    }
>
>    server {
>        listen 7788;
>        server_name example.com;
>        ... here actual request processing ...
>    }
>
> Maxim Dounin
>
> _______________________________________________
> nginx mailing list
> nginx@nginx.org
> http://nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx
>

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