NGINX unexpected behaviour with location directive and proxy_pass - nginx

Question

I have a NGINX configuration file to serve a Website with static files and via a development Server.
static -> http://localhost:8080
dev webserver -> http://localhost:8080/dev
There are several other services which I bind to different location directives.
Here is a snipped of the configuration file.
...
upstream qgis {
server qgis-spcluster_server:80;
}
...
server {
listen 8080;
server_name localhost;
location / {
root /usr/share/nginx/html/build;
index index.html index.htm;
auth_basic "Zugangskontrolle";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;
}
location /dev/ {
proxy_pass http://web_app/;
auth_basic "Zugangskontrolle";
auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;
}
location /static/ {
proxy_pass http://web_app/static/;
}
location /qgis/ {
proxy_pass http://qgis/;
}
location /apex/ {
proxy_pass http://apex/apex/;
auth_basic "off";
}
...
Everything works as expected until i open the URL to get the static files. After that all other URLs leads to the static files.
http://localhost:8080/apex -> Apex Service
http://localhost:8080 -> static Website
http://localhost:8080/apex -> static Website
For me everything looks ok, but indeed something is not ok.
The Basic_Auth produce another unexpected behaviour.
http://localhost:8080 -> basic auth -> success -> static website
http://localhost:8080/apex -> basic auth -> it is not possible to get rid of the pop up
So in the moment I'm a little bit clueless how to solve this issue.

Answer 1

Please remove the trailing / from your location directives or provide / when you access them.
Nginx looks for the longest prefix match location. When you access http://localhost:8080/apex, it's routed to / because /apex/ is not the prefix of /apex
Documentation of location is here

Answer 2

I tried now several things, but nothing really worked well. So I decided to create a second server block for all location directives which are problematic with my current setup.
Probably this is not the best solution, because I have still no idea why I get these problems. But it works now and that counts for me.