nginx: redirect subfolder to subdomain

I'm trying to redirect a subfolder to a subdomain in nginx. I want http://example.com/~meow/ to be redirected to http://meow.example.com/. I tried the following:

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

But it doesn't work. It gets caught by my location block for user directories:

location ~ ^/~([^/]+)/(.+\.php)$ {
    [...]
}

and

location ~ ^/\~([^/]+)/(.*)$ {
    [...]
}

So, how would I do this? Oh, and I only want /~meow/ to be redirected. All other user directories should not be changed.

You could try using nested location like this

location ~ ^/\~([^/]+)/(.*)$ {
  location ~ ^/\~meow/(.*)$ {
    rewrite ^(.*)$ http://meow.example.com$1 permanent;     
  }
  [...]
}

A static location would be more efficient for what you're asking. If you read the four rules at http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location , you'll see that a locaion ^~ will not be overridden by a regex location. You also seem to want to strip the leading /~meow while redirecting. The correct approach would be:

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

As an aside, there's no reason to capture the entire uri when rewriting. The current uri is already saved in $uri.

rewrite ^(.*)$ http://meow.example.com$1 permanent;

and

rewrite ^ http://meow.example.com$uri permanent;

will always produce the same result, and the second rewrite is more efficient, since it's a short circuited match and already contains what you're trying to capture anyway.

Regexp locations are checked in the order of their appearance in the configuration file and the first positive match is used. Which means, your location ~ ^/\~meow/(.*)$ must be above other two locations in the configuration file.