Nginx match location for root path and all other paths separately - nginx

I am running Play framework server behind nginx server. At the root path, I am serving static website and all other paths should be redirected to the Play server. I have the following default.conf file in /etc/nginx/conf.d (The system is RHEL 6.7)
# to match the root path only to serve static website
location = / {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.html index.htm;
# try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ /index.html;
}
# to match the cms login page
location /cms/ {
proxy_pass http://localhost:9000/;
}
# to match all the requests from the cms
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:9000/;
}
However, this configuration doesn't match the root path request. It gives 404 error. However, if I remove the third location rule, then it serves the static page at the root path.
Also, I noticed that first time I tried this, it worked. But now, it's not working any more. Please help.

The result you are getting is most likely due to the 2nd and 3rd location blocks not having "index" directives set. Except for well understood specific reasons, such as overriding the default index file type(s), the "index" should always be set at least within the server context or, preferably, within the http context. Similarly, the "root" directive should be set in the server context.
With your config, when a request hits the 3rd location block, there is no information your what to do with it. Actually, the 2nd block should not be needed from what you have described.
Also, as you are proxying to what appears to be another webserver, you need to ensure that this has the equivalent of "index" and "root" set.
Not sure exactly how the backend you are using works with respect to these. If not configurable there, then you must ensure that that every request hitting it has the URI spelt out fully.
To start with, depending on how exactly things are set up on your server, I will move the "index" and "root" directives up to the "server" level

Related

Nginx serve files on specific location from specific folder

I want NGINX to serve serve files from a location within a server.
As an example, I would like the url http://domain/ss/image.png to serve the file located within /home/data/screenshots/image.png
So far, I have attempted to use a regex in this manner
location ~ ^/ss/(.*) {
root /home/data/screenshots;
add_header content-type "image/png";
try_files $1 /$1;
}
however it appears that this location is never reached, being handled by the location spefcified to / (which in my case is a redirect).
I am not flexible with renaming/changing any of the file structure of the project and want to achieve this result with just the NGINX config modification.
As described by Richard's comment on the question, it appears that my regex approach was correct, however my issue was the usage of the try_files function.

NGINX – Serving multiple SPA’s on a single server

We have a development server with lots of single page apps that also handle routing in the frontend.
Normally for a single page app I would assume you need to configure something like:
location /some/path {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html?$args;
}
Now on our development server it is quite a lot of work to re-configure nginx for every small test app people put on there.
I want to:
Serve the file if found
Serve the index.html file if the path is a folder
If not found, go back one folder and try look for index.html and serve that
Try previous step until you find an index.html file
Stop trying when you reach the defined root path e.g. /some/path, if that doesn’t have an index.html, return the folder content
If some sort of while loop is not possible (performance is less critical since it's for development purposes only), I could limit it to up to 6 folders back. That should cover most SPA's.
Example:
Let's say I have a single page app on:
/some/path/my-app
And one goes to:
/some/path/my-app/page1/subpage2/id3
It should try:
/some/path/my-app/page1/subpage2/id3 (no match)
/some/path/my-app/page1/subpage2/id3/index.html (no match)
/some/path/my-app/page1/subpage2/index.html (no match)
/some/path/my-app/page1/index.html (no match)
/some/path/my-app/index.html (MATCH !)
P.S. I'm mainly a front-end developer, my nginx knowledge is very limited.
You can use a named location as the last parameter of a try_files statement to perform an internal rewrite to climb up the directory tree. Nginx will limit this to about 10 iterations before declaring a redirection loop.
For example:
root /path/to/root;
index index.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ #rewrite;
}
location #rewrite {
rewrite ^/(.+/)?. /$1 last;
}
The index and try_files directives handle looking for index.html, and the rewrite statement truncates the URI by removing one or more characters following a /.

Serving static website in nginx, wrong path for static files

I'm trying to use nginx to serve a static website that was given to me. Its folder structure is like this:
static_website/
index.html
www.example.com/
resources.example.com/
uploads.example.com/
The index.html file in the root is the one generated by httrack and it simply contains a redirect to www.example.com/index.html.
Inside the folder www.example.com are all the html files, in the other two folders are the css, javascript and image files.
Here is the nginx configuration:
server {
index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name example.com;
location / {
root /var/www/static_website/www.example.com;
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
index index.html;
}
}
I can navigate through the pages, but the css, javascript and image files are not loaded.
The path to one of the css files inside the html is like this:
href="../resources.example.com/style.css"
The only way I managed to get this working was to have the have the url like this:
example.com/www.example.com/
This way, all the path are correct. I'd like to avoid this and have simply example.com.
Is there a way to do this?
It looks like the site was originally intended to operate with ugly URLs like //example.com/www.example.com/.
But the path-relative URIs for the resources should work just fine relative to /, you just need to provide a location block which matches /resources.example.com/.
For example:
location / {
root /var/www/static_website/www.example.com;
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
index index.html;
}
location /resources.example.com/ {
root /var/www/static_website;
}
I originally commented that you should try this:
location ~ \.(css|js|jpg|png|svg)$ {
root /var/www/static_website;
}
Which achieves a similar goal, but Nginx will process prefix locations more efficiently that regular expression locations.
I want to share my experience with this problem for others encountering similar issues as the solution was not so obvious to me
My setup and problem in particular had to do with cloudlflare settings which i was using to leverage TLS instead of handling it on the origin server for one of my 2 sites. if you are serving your site from a CDN that supports encryption and you use nginx on your origin consider the following setup:
# static1.conf
{ server_name static1.com; root: /var/www/static1/public; listen 80; listen 443; }
# static2.conf - no tls setup in nginx, figured id let cloudflare handle it
{ server_name static2.com; root: /var/www/static2/public; listen 80; }
static1 was setup at the origin with letsencrypt to handle tls connections
static2 was setup at the origin without any tls configuration
from left to right, here are the appropriate cloudlfare TLS modes which allowed me to access the correct files thru nginx
The distinction between full and flexible is that full mode lets the origin handle the certificate.
Initially I had the static2 site misconfigured as full, which lacked a listen directive for 443 causing nginx to serve static1 instead.
I realize the original question has nothing to do with cdn's or cloudflare but this scheme / protocol mismatch cost me a few hours and I am hoping to save someone else from similar grief
Honestly I am surprised nginx doesn't stick to matching on server_name and that oit implicitly matches on scheme as a fallback (or atleast appears to), even without a default_server specified - and without any meaningful messages in the logs to boot! Debugging nginx is a nightmare sometimes.

Nginx URL routing

I think this is kind of basic stuff, but I'm struggling to find proper guide that would explain these things:
I have a index.php file and nginx config so that https://dev.something.com works ok.
But I need to change nginx config so that that address produces blank page, and index.php only works from https://dev.something.com/lists. I could put index.php inside lists directory, but isn't there more subtle solution?
And here's the hard part:
Users should be able to access
https://dev.something.com/lists/userName
https://dev.something.com/lists/userName/listName
userName and listName should be used as GET-parameters.
Can anyone help how I could achieve this kind of config with nginx?
You're asking a few (relatively basic) questions, and I would suggest you start with their free e-book https://www.nginx.com/blog/announcing-oreillys-new-book-nginx-a-practical-guide-to-high-performance/
You can define where nginx looks for index files with the root clause, and though they normally use the URL context relative to the server's root, it can be override in each location.
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#root
You can use portions of URLs as variables, which can be passed as paramters too.
location = /lists { # '=' will match exactly, no trailing url
root /path/where/index.php/lives;
try_files $uri /index.php;
}
location /lists { # this will match anything under that url
rewrite ^/lists/(\d+)/?$ /lists?user=$1; # matches username
rewrite ^/lists/(\d+)/(\d+)/?$ /lists?user=$1&list=$2; # matches username/list
}
location /{ #everything else
root /path/where/index.html/lives; #index.html is empty file.
try_files $uri /index.html;
}

double try_files directive for the same location in nginx

I discovered a nginx config snippet in serveral gists and config examples (mostly for PHP apps):
#site root is redirected to the app boot script
location = / {
try_files #site #site;
}
#all other locations try other files first and go to our front controller if none of them exists
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ #site;
}
But I just do not get it: Does the first try_files directive ever match? To me this looks like some nonsense hacking.
Please confirm or explain why not - thanks :)
This is what happens here:
The first location = / is only used when the path in the request is /, e.g. http://example.com/. The second location /is used for all other URLs, e.g. http://example.com/foo or http://example.com/bar.
The reason for the first location is to avoid any interference from index-directives that do a redirect to index.html or something similar.
Inside the first location the try_files-directive first looks for a file named #site, which does not exist and then redirects to the named location #site. The reason for this construct is that the redirect to the named location is purely internal, i.e. the #site location can not be accessed directly from the client and the $uri is kept unmodified during this redirect (which would not be the case for other redirects). The first parameter #site can be anything except a real existing file. I prefer to call it DUMMY for clarity.
The second location tries static files first and, if not found, then also redirects to the named location.

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