Nginx conditional Accept header

http-headersnginxruby-on-rails

Some mobile devices send the following incorrect requests to our servers :

GET / HTTP/1.0
Accept:
User-Agent : xxx

The empty Accept header causes our Ruby on Rails server to throw back a 500 error.

In Apache, the following directive allows us to rewrite the header before sending it to the application RoR server in order to cope with the broken devices :

    RequestHeader edit Accept ^$ "*/*" early

We're currently setting up nginx, but achieving the same work-around is proving difficult. We are able to set :

  proxy_set_header Accept */*;

However, this seems to have to be done inconditionally. Whenever trying to do :

if ($http_accept !~ ".") {
  proxy_set_header Accept */*;
}

It complains with the message : 

"proxy_set_header" directive is not allowed here

So, using nginx, how can we set the HTTP Accept header to */* when it is empty before sending the request to the application server ?

Best Answer

Try this 

set $acceptHeader $http_accept;
if ($acceptHeader !~ ".") {
  set $acceptHeader '/';
}
proxy_set_header Accept $acceptHeader;
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