Nginx: moving site to new domain - nginx

Question

I have a site example.com that runs wordpress. Now I want to move this blog to subdomain blog.example.com, but also I want following:
example.com --> static page (not wordpress)
blog.example.com --> new address to the blog
blog.example.com/foo --> handled by wordpress
example.com/foo --> permanent redirect to blog.example.com/foo
So I tried this next config:
server {
server_name example.com;
location = / {
root /home/path/to/site;
}
location / {
rewrite ^(.+) http://blog.example.com$request_uri? permanent;
}
}
In this case redirection is working perfectly. Unfortunately example.com redirects to blog.example.com too.

Answer 1

The reason it's redirecting is because when it tries to load the index file of example.com, it performs an internal redirect to /index.html, which is handled by your rewriting location. To avoid this, you can use try_files:
server {
server_name example.com;
root /home/path/to/site;
location = / {
# Change /index.html to whatever your static filename is
try_files /index.html =404;
}
location / {
return 301 http://blog.example.com$request_uri;
}
}

Answer 2

As long as the root of the two domains will point to different directories, you'll need two server directives - something like this:
server {
# this is the static site
server_name example.com;
location = / {
root /home/path/to/static/page;
}
location /foo {
return 301 http://blog.example.com$request_uri;
}
}
server {
# this is the WP site
server_name blog.example.com;
location = / {
root /home/path/to/new_blog;
}
.... some other WP redirects .....
}