Nginx alias not working

Question

I'm trying to pass all traffic at location ^/[a-z0-9]{24}$to index.html at a different root directory. I have my config set up like so:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {

    listen 443 ssl;

    server_name example.com;
    root /Users/me/sites/store_front/static;
    index index.html;

    try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.html =404;

    location ~ "^/[a-z0-9]{24}$" {
        alias /Users/me/web_app/static;
        try_files $uri index.html;
    }
}

For some reason when I curl this url I get a 404:

$ curl -I https://example.com/55c898e7faa137f42409d403

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Server: nginx/1.8.0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 168
Connection: keep-alive

Does anyone know how to get this alias working?

update:

One caveat to this is that I need all the relative urls in index.html to load correctly:

<link href="/styles/main.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
<script src="/javascript/main.js"></script>

These files actually exist in the web_app directory but nginx tries to load them from store_front

Thanks

Richard Smith · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-09T17:50:29.113

3

Pointing ^/[a-z0-9]{24}$ to index.html is easy. The resource files /styles/main.css and /javascript/main.js need to have unique URIs otherwise nginx does not know which files to serve.

If the /styles and /javascript prefix is also used by the store_front, you will need to isolate the individual files:

location = /styles/main.css {
    root /Users/me/web_app/static;
}
location = /javascript/main.js {
    root /Users/me/web_app/static;
}
location ~ "^/[a-z0-9]{24}" {
    root /Users/me/web_app/static;
    rewrite ^ /index.html break;
}

If the /styles, /javascript and ^/[a-z0-9]{24}$ URIs are all unique, you might combine the above into a single location:

location ~ "^/([a-z0-9]{24}|styles|javascript)" {
    root /Users/me/web_app/static;
    rewrite "^/[a-z0-9]{24}$" /index.html break;
}

Or even:

location ~ "^/([a-z0-9]{24}|styles/main.css|javascript/main.js)" {
    root /Users/me/web_app/static;
    rewrite "^/[a-z0-9]{24}$" /index.html break;
}

edited Jun 09 '16 at 17:50

answered Jun 09 '16 at 16:21

Richard Smith

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Is it a good idea to use multiple `root`s? I thought `alias` was best practice in a nested locations. – jwerre Jun 09 '16 at 16:29
That seems to work, index.html load, but none of my scripts or styles for index.html load since they relative to the index page. – jwerre Jun 09 '16 at 16:36
Answer updated: the terminating `$` on the location regex has been removed to match the URI of any relative resource files. And another `rewrite` has been added to handle these resource files. – Richard Smith Jun 09 '16 at 17:02
This is so close, thanks for your help with this. Unfortunately, my static files aren't loading still. Wouldn't something like this: `rewrite "^/(styles|javascript)(/.*)" $2 break;` be more appropriate since `index.html` is being is located at `https://example.com/55c898e7faa137f42409d403` – jwerre Jun 09 '16 at 17:30
Ok, major rewrite – Richard Smith Jun 09 '16 at 17:50
Ah, unfortunately `styles/main.css` and `javascript/main.js` exist in both `web_app` and `store_front` directories. I wonder `proxy_pass` would be a better solution? I could create a separate config for both directories and them reverse proxy the to `web_app/index.html` from `store_front`. – jwerre Jun 09 '16 at 18:03
1

URLs need to be unique. – Richard Smith Jun 09 '16 at 18:20

Nginx alias not working

update:

1 Answers1