[NGINX]Can't get proxy_pass and robots.txt to work - nginx

Question

I'm running Kibana behind NGINX and I want to add a robots.txt. I added robots.txt to /var/www/example.com but no matter what I try, when I access example.com/robots.txt it redirects to Kibana.
server {
server_name example.com www.example.com;
location = /robots.txt {
root /var/www/example.com/;
}
location / {
if ($request_uri ~* "^/robots.txt") {
rewrite ^/robots.txt /robots.txt last;
}
proxy_pass http://localhost:5601;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
}
~
}
server {
if ($host = www.example.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} # managed by Certbot
if ($host = example.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} # managed by Certbot
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
return 404; # managed by Certbot
}
I've tried the following:
root /var/www/example.com/html;
under location /
location = /robots.txt {
alias /var/www/example/com/html/robots.txt ;
}
under server.
The closest I can get is with the root one, which will redirect example.com/robots.txt to example.com/var/www/example.com/html/robots.txt.

Answer 1

If the path of /robots.txt is /var/www/example.com/html/robots.txt, use:
server {
...
location = /robots.txt {
root /var/www/example.com/html;
}
location / {
...
}
}
The exact match location block will always take precedence. See this document for details.