Nginx blatantly ignores location block even though it matches - nginx

Question

When a user visits website.com I want the contents of the /home/user/project/frontend to be served (a single page app)
When a URL comes in that matches /assets, it should look into the /home/user/project/backend/staticfiles folder, which contains collected static files from django.
To the above effect, below is my Nginx conf
upstream backend {
server 127.0.0.1:8000;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name website.com www.website.com;
root /home/user/project/frontend;
index index.html index.htm;
location /assets {
root /home/user/project/backend/staticfiles;
}
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
location ~^/(admin|api|auth|swagger|webhook) {
proxy_connect_timeout 600;
proxy_send_timeout 600;
proxy_read_timeout 600;
send_timeout 600;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_pass http://backend;
}
}
Intuitively, the above should work, right? However, when a request like website.com/assets/admin/css/base.css comes in, according to the logs, Nginx goes looking into the /home/user/project/frontend folder, which is NOT what the configuration is saying it should do.
2022/08/24 22:42:29 [error] 18946#18946: *1 open() "/home/user/project/frontend/assets/admin/css/base.css" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: xx.xx.xx.xx, server: xx.xx.xx.xx, request: "GET /assets/admin/css/base.css HTTP/1.1", host: "website.com"
On a different server, I have the EXACT same configuration, EXACT same django-react setup, EXACT nginx version, EXACT everything, yet, on this fresh installation, with the SAME configuration, Nginx is absolutely ignoring the location /assets { } block like it doesn't even exist.
Is there a typo or something somewhere? Because nginx -t also indicates the file is fine.
When I do website.com/assets/admin/css/base.css/ (note trailing forward slash), Nginx attempts THEN to look into the right folder, although it's off too.
2022/08/24 23:01:39 [error] 18946#18946: *4 "/home/user/project/backend/staticfiles/assets/admin/css/base.css/index.html" is not found (2: No such file or directory), client: xx.xx.xx.xx, server: xx.xx.xx.xx, request: "GET /assets/admin/css/base.css/ HTTP/1.1", host: "website.com"
Maybe the whole approach I'm using is buggy, unreliable and or inconsistent. Maybe there's a better approach (although as I type this, I have the EXACT same conf working as expected on another server).
Please enlighten me.

Answer 1

Here's an updated conf file, that I can confirm to be working on my new setup.
From this article:
The modifier ^~ in the following location block results in a case sensitive regular expression match. Therefore the URI /images or /images/logo.png will be matched but stops searching as soon as a match is found.
upstream backend {
server 127.0.0.1:8000;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name xx.xx.xx.xx;
root /home/user/project/frontend;
index index.html index.htm;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
location ^~ /assets/ {
root /home/user/project/backend;
}
location ~^/(admin|api|auth|swagger|webhook) {
...
}
}
And so with the above, when Nginx gets a request like
example.com/assets/admin/base.css, it points to the folder
/home/user/project/backend/assets/admin/base.css
Basically, it appends the location block URL to the root path.
In my django settings.py, I have these
STATIC_URL = "/assets/"
STATIC_ROOT = os.path.join(BASE_DIR, "assets")