I have a docker image that serves an Angular app via an nginx webserver. The image is to be deployed into a kubernetes cluster, exposed behind an nginx-ingress resource, so all my DNS config is handled by ingress. A requirement appeared where I'm supposed to keep some legacy configuration, mainly a URI of the form /some/path/to/stuff/{a large code}/something/{another code}. I have the regex settled and everthing works on that part.

It was requested to perform a redirect from www.example.com/some/path/to/stuff/{a large code}/something/{another code} to www.example.com/path/{a large code}/something/{another code}?

The constraint being is that the only modification I can do is modifying the nginx.conf file that's injected in the Dockerfile.

I tried location regex with proxy_pass, rewrite and return 301.

From my tests it seems impossible to do while being DNS-agnostic.

Tl;dr can redirects be performed on webservers while being DNS agnostic?

EDIT: This is the Dockerfile:

FROM node:12.16.1-alpine AS builder
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY package.json package-lock.json ./
RUN npm install
COPY . .
RUN npm run build-prod

FROM nginx:1.15.8-alpine
RUN rm -rf /usr/share/nginx/html/*
COPY ./nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
COPY --from=builder /usr/src/app/dist/dish-ui/ /usr/share/nginx/html

This is the base nginx.conf file:

worker_processes  1;
 
events {
  worker_connections  1024;
}

http {
  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name  localhost;

    root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
    index  index.html index.htm;
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;

    gzip on;
    gzip_min_length 1000;
    gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    location / {
      try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
    }
  }
}

What I tried: 1. added rewrite rules in location blocks:

location ~* ".*([a-z0-9]{64})/something/([a-z0-9]{64})
quot; {
  rewrite ".*([a-z0-9]{64})/something/([a-z0-9]{64})
quot; /new/$1/$2/path;
}

The above configuration caused 404 error because the new path couldn't be found in the root folder.

2. added rewrite rule inside server block:

rewrite ".*([a-z0-9]{64})/something/([a-z0-9]{64})
quot; /new/$1/$2/path;

This would only check once, subsequent requests wouldn't get rewritten. It also didn't redirect properly.

3. added proxy pass to localhost:

location ~* ".*([a-z0-9]{64})/something/([a-z0-9]{64})
quot; {
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1/new/$1/$2/path;
}

This didn't work either. My index.html would alway be loaded, it seemed that the rule was ignored completely, I also placed it BEFORE location /.

I settled on hardcoding the correct URL and use a 301 return.