In nginx, how to allow any string as an http method?

Question

I'm using nginx as a reverse proxy server.

My application servers behind it accept custom extension methods for requests. For example, "MYMETHOD".

However the nginx default configuration seems to only accept non-extension methods, such as HEAD, GET, POST, etc, and returns a default nginx 400 response for requests that did not have a non-extension method, instead of proxying those requests to my app servers.

How can I make nginx accept and proxy any http requests regardless of their method?

I do not want to whitelist specific methods, because this would require me to change the nginx configuration every time I need to support a new method in my app servers, and I do not want those to be tightly coupled.

[edit]

The solution has to work for official supported nginx distributions, either on nginx.com or popular linux distributions (debian, centos, etc).

Obviously I can just alter the nginx source code and make it pass along any methods, but if I'm altering the source code and recompiling it's no longer nginx but rather a fork of it.

Answer 1

You can use ngx_http_allow_methods_module for allowing custom HTTP methods. This module allows arbitrary HTTP methods to be passed to a backend application.

Example:

http {
    server {

        location /api/ {
            allow_methods ".*";
        }

    }
}

Directive

allow_methods "^(GET|POST|PUT|DELETE|PATCH|LINK|COPY)$";

This directive describes HTTP methods that should be passed along. The pattern is case-sensitive (as per RFC 2616). If it is absent, the default rules of Nginx apply. You should use this directive only in the locations that you really need it in.