Guys,

The following is what I have done. My goal is ultimately use regex to inspect the incoming URI and make proxy_pass decisions. The "if" statement below is just a test to validate the if statements work. As you can see, I get the "unkown directive" error. Do you think I need to use the --with-pcre= option?

yum install gcc openssl-devel pcre-devel zlib-devel
yum install mlocate

./configure --sbin-path=/sbin/nginx --conf-path=/usr/local/nginx/nginx.conf --pid-path=/usr/local/nginx/nginx.pid --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_perl_module --without-http_rewrite_module

make
sudo make install



============================= snippet from nginx.conf=============================

location /johndesp/ {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_pass_request_headers on;
if (!-f $request_filename) {
proxy_pass http://ec2-75-101-166-203.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080/johndesp/;
}
========================================================================

thanks

johndesp