Tasty Cookies with nginx

In a previous post I talked about the best way to handle putting an application into maintenance mode. In addition to sending the appropriate status code (503) for machines, nginx is configured to serve a helpful page to inform users of the maintenance window. Today, I would like to build on this configuration to make it possible for a few users to test the application while it is in maintenance mode for the rest of the world. There are a few different ways this could be handled, but HTTP cookies are a simple and flexible solution.

Recall these directives which instruct nginx to check for our maintenance page and set the status code to 503:

if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
  return 503;
}

Let’s modify this with a variable to track state. Now, we can add an additional check for anything we would like to turn $maint off. $http_cookie holds all the cookies for the request:
set $maint off;

if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) {
  set $maint on;
}

if ($http_cookie ~* "topsekrit" ) {
  set $maint off;
}

if ($maint = on) {
  return 503;
}

You can now set a cookie with a value of “topsekrit” and nginx will let you circumvent the maintenance page to test your new code before you release it to the world.
				
				

				

	
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