Nginx setting expires header with proxy - nginx

Question

I have the following base Nginx configuration (pre-installed Ghost platform on DigitalOcean droplet):
server {
listen 80;
server_name xxx.com;
client_max_body_size 10M;
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:2368/;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_buffering off;
}
}
Now I tried to set the following expiry header for my assets but without success:
location ~ ^/assets/ {
expires 30d;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control "public";
}
Based on the information I've found, Nginx only uses one location path at a time so have to copy the proxy_* parameters inside the assets location block. If I just copy them I get an error (regex with proxy_pass) that can be solved by rewriting the URL before passing it to the proxy. I already did some experiments with that but I don't get it to work either.
Does anyone have an example of how to set expiry headers when a proxy_pass is present? I simply want all files under xxx.com/assets/ to have the proper expiry date.

Answer 1

location /assets/ {
expires 30d;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control "public";
proxy_pass http://localhost:2368/assets/;
# or proxy_pass http://localhost:2368;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_buffering off;
}
Nginx doc for proxy_pass say that:
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.
I your case /assets/ get replaced by / (which is an URI). To avoid that either use proxy_pass with URI equal to location prefix (proxy_pass http://localhost:2368/assets/;) or don't use URI at all (proxy_pass http://localhost:2368;). But in latter case nginx will proxy unnormalized URI.

Answer 2

Managed to solve it by using the script below (note the /assets/ after the proxy).
server {
listen 80;
server_name xaviertalpe.be;
client_max_body_size 10M;
location /assets/ {
expires 30d;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control "public";
proxy_pass http://localhost:2368/assets/;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_buffering off;
}
location / {
proxy_pass http://localhost:2368/;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_buffering off;
}
}