nginx match specific file from different folder on certain routes - nginx

Question

I have an angularjs app, it has a blog as well. This url shows all blog posts under
http://example.com/blog/
And specific blog posts under
http://example.com/blog/example-blog-post-title
Now i'm precompiling HTML of blog posts for SEO purposes and i want to serve them completely separately from my main app like this:
...
root "/home/ubuntu/client/public";
location / { ## Handle default requests ##
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
location /blog { ## serve precompiled blog HTML
alias /home/ubuntu/bloghtml;
try_files $uri.html $uri/ index.html;
}
...
And this works, by going to http://example.com/blog/example-blog-post-title nginx successfully serves file /home/ubuntu/bloghtml/example-blog-post-title.html
However the issue is that in this case nginx doesn't correctly route blog post list under http://example.com/blog/ to my main angular app, i get error 403 on that URL.
I tried changing location /blog to location /blog/ in conf file, this makes the http://example.com/blog/ work, howewever i get 404 errors on http://example.com/blog/example-blog-post-title
How can i make this work for both cases?

Answer 1

If you change the location from /blog to /blog/ you need to remember to change alias from /home/ubuntu/bloghtml to /home/ubuntu/bloghtml/. The alias and location need to have the same ending, otherwise the calculated pathnames are wrong.
I try to avoid using alias and try_files in the same block because of some known issues. You might consider making the last directory in the path blog so that you can use root instead.
I presume that your angular app is /index.html, in which case your try_files statement is incorrect. The $url/ will cause it to try /blog/index.html (assuming you have an index directive in force) and index.html is missing a leading /.
I would suggest you try:
location /blog {
alias /home/ubuntu/bloghtml;
try_files $uri.html /index.html;
}
but consider designing out the alias directive too.