Nginx – How to have nginx serve only the home page of site

nginxregex

I am running a server with nginx on port 80 and Apache on 8080. I want the home page of my site to be served with nginx, and every other request passed through to Apache. I found this great article and understand the nginx proxy_pass directive, but I can't figure out the right regex to tell nginx to only serve the home page of my site. Since users will come to the site by just visiting http://mysite.com (without /index.htm), I don't know what "location" value I should use.

Here's an example config file that demonstrates how to have all pages sent to Apache (like I want) except the /css folder, and image files. As you can see nginx uses a simple regex to specify what should be served by nginx. What regex would I use to specify only the home page should be served by nginx? Or should I be using try_files somehow?

server {
      root /usr/local/www/mydomain.com;
      server_name mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;

      # next line says anything that matches this regex should be sent to Apache     
      location / {
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            # Apache is listening on port 8080
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
      }

      # Example 1 - Specify a folder and its contents
      # To serve everything under /css from nginx only
      location /css { }

      # Example 2 - Specify a RegEx pattern such as file extensions
      # to serve only image files directly from Nginx
      location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$
      {
            # this will match any file of the above extensions
      }
}

Best Answer

OK, so what you really need to be doing is:

  1. Serve all static files from nginx, and only pass upstream to Apache any other requests.
  2. When necessary for performance reasons, make the homepage a static file such as index.html in the document root. Thus, nginx will serve it directly. Delete it to return to the previous behavior.

Your configuration should look something like this:

server {
      root /usr/local/www/mydomain.com;
      server_name mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;

      index index.html;

      location @upstream {
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            # Apache is listening on port 8080
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
      }

      location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ @upstream;
      }
}

Later you should look at doing caching within your web app; if it writes generated HTML files to the disk, you could then have nginx serve those files directly out of its cache.

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