Nginx reverse proxy + url rewrite

Nginx is running on port 80, and I'm using it to reverse proxy URLs with path /foo to port 3200 this way.

location /foo {
                proxy_pass http://localhost:3200;
                proxy_redirect     off;
                proxy_set_header   Host $host;
}

This works fine, but I have an application on port 3200 , for which I don't want the initial /foo to be sent to. That is - when I access http://localhost/foo/bar , I want only /bar to be the path as received by the app. So i tried adding this line to the place block above

rewrite ^(.*)foo(.*)$ http://localhost:3200/$2 permanent;

This causes 302 redirect (change in url), but i want 301. What should i do?

Any redirect to localhost doesn't make sense from a remote system (e.g. client's Web browser). So the rewrite flags permanent (301) or redirect (302) are not usable in your case.

Please try following the setup with a transparent rewrite rule

location  /foo {
  rewrite /foo/(.*) /$1  break;
  proxy_pass         http://localhost:3200;
  proxy_redirect     off;
  proxy_set_header   Host $host;
}

Use curl -i to test your rewrites. A very subtle change to the rule can cause nginx to perform redirects