Nginx won't serve the json responses - nginx

Question

I've got a single page application running on a server correctly, serving pages across different urls:
example.com
example.com/jsonendpoint
But when I try to access an endpoint meant to return JSON, I get an HTML response. The nginx config looks like:
server {
root /home/myapplication/server/public;
location / {
proxy_pass http://myapplication/;
proxy_redirect off;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
location /jsonendpoint {
proxy_pass http://myapplication/;
default_type application/json;
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
If I comment out the try_files line, then the JSON response works fine and I can still access the root URL at example.com but when I try to access example.com/jsonendpoint then nginx returns a 404.
How do I fix the config to get both things to work?
EDIT:
When I curl the server from within the VPS it's hosted on:
curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" http://localhost:3000/jsonendpoint
I get a JSON response:
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
When I make the same curl request from my local machine (which means going through nginx then the response type is wrong:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
This rules out the possibility that the problem lies with the backend server.
The mime.types file does have the json mime type added and it is being included by nginx. I've also tried forcing a response type per location block (see above snippet).

Answer 1

Check that in your in your mime types you have something like:
application/json json;
Then try to query your site using something like this:
curl -i -H "Accept: application/json" http://your-site
Check for the header content-type if your application is returning json it should be:
content-type: application/json
If you get something like:
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Check your backend to add the proper content type.
In case you would like to force the type, try this:
location / {
default_type application/json;
# ...
}

Answer 2

Old question but wanted to share what fixed the issue for me:
nginx-user did not have access to my json files. Apparently root-user loads you the html when you browse to website. But other requests like json calls will be served in nginx worker threads as nginx-user.
I added read and execute permissions to all users in html-folder to solve this problem (there are maybe better solutions also):
chmod -R 755 /usr/share/nginx/html