kaspars Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> if ($http_cookie ~*
> "comment_author_|wordpress_(?!test_cookie)|wp-post
> pass_" ) {
> set $donot_cache 1;
> }

AFAIK, the '$donot_cache ' you set here will not contain anything outside the if block. and therefore your no_cache test will always be done on an empty variable.

Variable scopes are not documented and only trial and error and fumbling in the dark reveals stuff.

Would be great if they just had global scopes so that once it is set, it is there to be used everywhere. However, I think I read something negative once on this from Maxim Dounin (who seems to be one of the devs) so I think no matter how much we might want this sort of thing, it will not happen.

A bit of a pain but that is how it is and most of us don't know enough to fill in the gaps in the documentation.

I had a similar problem and had to use the 3rd party lua module to run the test in a way that the variable set was available after: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,161969,168394#msg-168394

In your case, why not just use 'fastcgi_no_cache $cookie_COOKIE-1$cookie_COOKIE-2$cookie_COOKIE-3' and skip the whole 'if' test?

The advice is to avoid using 'if' unless absolutely required. See: http://wiki.nginx.org/IfIsEvil