Hi

I have been trying to imlement a custom 403 error page - to be triggered when the request method is not in HEAD,GET,POST. I started with something like this (note I was specifically triggering the 403 error for GET requests for testing):

root /htdocs

location = /403.html {
internal;
}

error_page 403 = /403.html;

if ($request_method !~ ^(POST)$ ) {
return 403;
}

location / {
index index.html;
}

For some reason, the above config *always* caused nginx internal 403 error page to be generated - instead of my custom page at /htdoc/403.html.

After scouring forums and whatnot, I found a suggestion, which is to put the if() inside the location block - like:

location / {
index index.html;

if ($request_method !~ ^(POST)$ ) {
return 403;
}
}

Doing this and everything seemed to work. I just don't understand why - can someone explain this?

Cheers