Nginx+Gunicorn - reverse proxy not working - nginx

Question

I am trying to setup a python flask application on a server following this guide: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-serve-flask-applications-with-gunicorn-and-nginx-on-ubuntu-18-04. I have this working running on my local machine by following the guide. However when I am trying to implement on the actual server with the same config I am running into an issue on proxying requests back to the gunicorn server. I am able to serve static content from Nginx with no problem. When I make a web service call from the static content back to Nginx, it should be proxied back to the gunicorn server.
For example when I try to make the call 'http://example.com/rest/webService', I would expect Nginx to pass anything starting with /rest/ back to gunicorn. The error below is all I can see in the error logs about what is happening:
2019/01/18 12:48:18 [error] 2930#2930: *18 open() "/var/www/html/rest/webService" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: ip_address, server: example.com, request: "GET /rest/webService HTTP/1.1", host: "example.com", referrer: "http://example.com/"
Here is the setup for python_app:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com www.example.com;
root /var/www/html;
index index.html;
location ^/rest/(.*)$ {
include proxy_params;
proxy_pass http://unix:/home/username/python_app/python_app.sock;
} }
The only change to my nginx.conf file was to change 'include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*' to 'include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/python_app'.
Please let me know if you have any ideas at all on what I may be missing! Thanks!

Answer 1

Not a solution, but some questions....
If you run
sudo systemctl status myproject
Do you see affirmation that gunicorn is running, and what socket it is bound to?
And does
sudo nginx -t
come back saying no diagnostic?
The regex in the location block for nginx -- I don't see anything similar to that in the guide, I see that you're trying to capture everything after "rest/", but looking at the nginx documents, I think you'd have to have $1 to reference the captured part of the URL. Can you try without the "^/rest/(.*)$" and see whether nginx finds anything?
Is the group that owns your directory a group that nginx is part of (a lot of setups are www-data)