How do I properly write an "or" statement in an Nginx location block?

Question

I'm using Nginx on CentOS 7. I want to add a cache control header for files that end in a particular extension or taht contain a "/image/" string in the URL. I tried this

  location / {
    proxy_pass http://scale; # match the name of upstream directive which is defined above
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    if ($request_uri ~* ".(ico|gif|jpe?g|png)$") | ($request_uri ~* "/image/") {
      expires 60d;
      access_log off;
      add_header Pragma public;
      add_header Cache-Control "public";
      break;
    }
  }

but upon restarting the server, I'm getting a

invalid condition "$request_uri" in /etc/nginx/conf.d/scale.conf:16

error. If I remove " | ($request_uri ~* "/image/")" from the problematic line, all restarts fine, but then I'm unable to match stuff that I want. How do I write a proper or statement in my configuration file?

Solution

In nginx, if is evil. But if you really want to do it that way, here's how you would do it:

if ($request_uri ~* "($\/image\/.*)|(.*\.(ico|gif|jpe?g|png)$)") {

Essentially, just combine the regexes.