nginx rewrite not working - nginx

Question

I'm trying to set up a simple nginx server to act as a proxy between my front end ui and my back end api. The setup is fairly simple. The UI makes all api requests to /api/endpoint and the proxy server passes the request to the api. The proxy also needs to rewrite the request so that instead of going to http://api.location.net/api/endpoint, it goes to http://api.location.net/endpoint. The UI resides on http://api.location.net. This part isn't working (i get a 500 error) and I'm pretty sure it has to do with how I'm writing my rewrite rule. Here's my nginx config.
daemon off;
error_log off;
worker_processes 2;
worker_rlimit_nofile 100000;
events {
worker_connections 50000;
accept_mutex off;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
access_log off;
sendfile on;
server {
listen 80 default_server;
server_name localhost _;
location / {
alias /srv/site/;
}
location /api/ {
rewrite ^/api ""; # I think this is the problem
proxy_pass http://api.location.net;
proxy_pass_request_headers on;
proxy_pass_header X-ResponseData;
proxy_redirect off;
}
}
}
Any help would be greatly appreciated, nginx is still fairly new for me and the documentation on nginx rewrite doesn't seem to have what I need.

Answer 1

If I understood you right, this should help
location /api/ {
proxy_pass http://api.location.net/;
proxy_pass_request_headers on;
proxy_pass_header X-ResponseData;
proxy_redirect off;
}
Note the URI part at proxy_pass directive
If the proxy_pass directive is specified with a URI, then when a
request is passed to the server, the part of a normalized request URI
matching the location is replaced by a URI specified in the directive:
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_pass