Skip to content

Ingress Path Matching

Regular Expression Support

Important

Regular expressions is not supported in the spec.rules.host field. The wildcard character '*' must appear by itself as the first DNS label and matches only a single label. You cannot have a wildcard label by itself (e.g. Host == "*").

Note

Please see the FAQ for Validation Of path

The ingress controller supports case insensitive regular expressions in the spec.rules.http.paths.path field. This can be enabled by setting the nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex annotation to true (the default is false).

Hint

Kubernetes only accept expressions that comply with the RE2 engine syntax. It is possible that valid expressions accepted by NGINX cannot be used with ingress-nginx, because the PCRE library (used in NGINX) supports a wider syntax than RE2. See the RE2 Syntax documentation for differences.

See the description of the use-regex annotation for more details.

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1 kind: Ingress metadata:  name: test-ingress  annotations:  nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true" spec:  ingressClassName: nginx  rules:  - host: test.com  http:  paths:  - path: /foo/.*  pathType: ImplementationSpecific  backend:  service:  name: test  port:  number: 80

The preceding ingress definition would translate to the following location block within the NGINX configuration for the test.com server:

location ~* "^/foo/.*" { ... }

Path Priority

In NGINX, regular expressions follow a first match policy. In order to enable more accurate path matching, ingress-nginx first orders the paths by descending length before writing them to the NGINX template as location blocks.

Please read the warning before using regular expressions in your ingress definitions.

Example

Let the following two ingress definitions be created:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1 kind: Ingress metadata:  name: test-ingress-1 spec:  ingressClassName: nginx  rules:  - host: test.com  http:  paths:  - path: /foo/bar  pathType: Prefix  backend:  service:  name: service1  port:  number: 80  - path: /foo/bar/  pathType: Prefix  backend:  service:  name: service2  port:  number: 80 
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1 kind: Ingress metadata:  name: test-ingress-2  annotations:  nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: /$1 spec:  ingressClassName: nginx  rules:  - host: test.com  http:  paths:  - path: /foo/bar/(.+)  pathType: ImplementationSpecific  backend:  service:  name: service3  port:   number: 80

The ingress controller would define the following location blocks, in order of descending length, within the NGINX template for the test.com server:

location ~* ^/foo/bar/.+ { ... } location ~* "^/foo/bar/" { ... } location ~* "^/foo/bar" { ... }

The following request URI's would match the corresponding location blocks:

  • test.com/foo/bar/1 matches ~* ^/foo/bar/.+ and will go to service 3.
  • test.com/foo/bar/ matches ~* ^/foo/bar/ and will go to service 2.
  • test.com/foo/bar matches ~* ^/foo/bar and will go to service 1.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

  • If the use-regex OR rewrite-target annotation is used on any Ingress for a given host, then the case insensitive regular expression location modifier will be enforced on ALL paths for a given host regardless of what Ingress they are defined on.

Warning

The following example describes a case that may inflict unwanted path matching behavior.

This case is expected and a result of NGINX's a first match policy for paths that use the regular expression location modifier. For more information about how a path is chosen, please read the following article: "Understanding Nginx Server and Location Block Selection Algorithms".

Example

Let the following ingress be defined:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1 kind: Ingress metadata:  name: test-ingress-3  annotations:  nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true" spec:  ingressClassName: nginx  rules:  - host: test.com  http:  paths:  - path: /foo/bar/bar  pathType: Prefix  backend:  service:  name: test  port:   number: 80  - path: /foo/bar/[A-Z0-9]{3}  pathType: ImplementationSpecific  backend:  service:  name: test  port:   number: 80

The ingress controller would define the following location blocks (in this order) within the NGINX template for the test.com server:

location ~* "^/foo/bar/[A-Z0-9]{3}" { ... } location ~* "^/foo/bar/bar" { ... }

A request to test.com/foo/bar/bar would match the ^/foo/bar/[A-Z0-9]{3} location block instead of the longest EXACT matching path.