Nginx location "not equal to" regex

i was looking for the same. and found this solution.

Use negative regex assertion:

location ~ ^/(?!(favicon\.ico|resources|robots\.txt)) { 
.... # your stuff 
} 

Source Negated Regular Expressions in location

Explanation of Regex :

If URL does not match any of the following path

example.com/favicon.ico
example.com/resources
example.com/robots.txt

Then it will go inside that location block and will process it.

According to nginx documentation

there is no syntax for NOT matching a regular expression. Instead, match the target regular expression and assign an empty block, then use location / to match anything else

So you could define something like

location ~ (dir1|file2\.php) { 
    # empty
}

location / {
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://example.com/$1 permanent; 
}