title: Nginx redirect if cookie present
body: <p>I've seen some limited resources on checking for cookies with Nginx, but I couldn't really find the answer I was looking for, hopefully some of you Nginx masters can give me a hand.</p>
  
  <p>Essentially I have a vhost that I'd like to redirect to a different domain unless the user has a cookie, here is what I've created:</p>
  
  <pre><code>server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
  
    if ($http_cookie ~* "dev_cookie" ) {
      root /home/deploy/apps/example/current/public;
      passenger_enabled on;
      rack_env production;
      break;
    }
    rewrite ^/(.*) http://beta.example.com/$1 permanent;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But it doesn't seem to work, I get the error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[emerg]: "root" directive is not allowed here in /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf:45
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm not sure how to proceed here, any ideas guys?</p>