Nginx location with optional sublocation - wordpress

Question

I have a WordPress site with php-fpm and nginx configured. Works well.
Now I created an Angular Universal app which I want to display on the certain page. To be more specific:
I want WordPress to work here: mysite.com/myapp
I want Angular to work here: mysite.com/myapp/any/path/
I tried so many different configurations but nothing works as I want it to. For instance:
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}
location ~ ^/myapp/(.+)$ {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:4000/$1$is_args$args;
proxy_redirect off;
proxy_read_timeout 60s;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
root /var/www/mysite/myapp/dist/;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/tst04.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
So as you can see I'm trying to redirect all requests starting with /myapp/{something} to the http://127.0.0.1:4000 but it does not work. By "does not work" I mean that all requests are redirected to the localhost, even /myapp/- which I don't understand because /myapp/ does not match the regex /myapp/(.+) (note the + sign).
I looked into the nginx error log and found that when I enter mysite.com/myapp/ it tries to redirect it to the upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:4000/index.php" which is not desired to me. When I enter mysite.com/myapp/anypath/ it redirects it to the upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:4000/anypath/" which is correct.
Question: why it doesn't work?

Answer 1

Dang! I guess I had to describe the problem somewhere to find the solution ;)
So here's what was happening:
I make a request e.x. mysite.com/myapp
Nginx matches it to the /location
It runs try_files to the end and fires /index.php?$args which resolves to /myapp/index.php
Nginx keeps resolving new location and it matches ^/myapp/(.+)$ so it's being redirected to the http://127.0.0.1:4000/index.php
Tadam! We have the explanation. Now how did I solve it? Well, the solution is pretty simple. I don't want my PHP files to be mathed against ^/myapp/(.+)$ regex so I modified it like this:
"^/myapp/([^ php]+)$" (note the quotation marks)
and everything started to work as expected.
Posting this in case future readers will encounter similar problem.