Nginx redirect without trailing slashes AND case-insensitive

As mentioned in comments to your question, this is possible by use of perl module. Assuming you'll use that $uri_lowercase you may write something like this:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ $uri_lowercase $uri_lowercase/ =404;
}

Note however that $uri_lowercase may not fit your needs if you have mixed case URLs like /Home/UseR/teSt.html and you need to try all bunch of partially lowercased uri. If this is your case i strongly advice to get some policy on your directories and require them to be lowercase.

I just had (and fixed) this same problem and ended up here trying to find the answer. The nginx documentation (http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_rewrite_module.html), does not clearly state that the ~* only works inside an if statement, but apparently, that is the case.

To get case-insensitive regular expression matching for an ngnix URL rewrite outside of an if statement, I had to use the Apache/Perl style:

rewrite "(?i)foobar" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 redirect;

See http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html (search for insensitive). It also seems that prefixing (?i) outside of a specific capture group makes it apply to the whole search string. Note: This does NOT seem to work with "^(?i)foobar" because it seems that the "^" is implied.

Just to be sure, though, and to make any future rewrites easier to maintain and less ambiguous if you end up doing a bunch of them, you may want to do something like this:

location /foobar {
     rewrite "(?i)" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 redirect;
}

Hope this helps...