I want to redirect all the traffic at location ~ ^/ using Nginx. I tried using $msec in nginx if condition but it is returning error unknown directive “if($msec)”. I want to have start_date, start_time, end_date and end_time constrains between which i want to redirect all of my traffic to a different page.

I have tried using if condition in a location block

 location ~ ^/ {
   if($msec > $start_dateT$start_time && $msec < $start_dateT$start_time) {
    rewrite ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/maintenance/?redirect_url=$request_uri break;
   }
 }