Nginx. Wild card Alias location. Is it possible

try_files tries the literal path you specify in relation to the defined root directive and sets the internal file pointer. If you use for instance try_files /app/cache/ $uri @fallback; with index index.php index.html; then it will test the paths in this order:

1. $document_root/app/cache/index.php
2. $document_root/app/cache/index.html
3. $document_root$uri

before finally internally redirecting to the @fallback named location. You can also use a file or a status code (=404) as your last parameter but if using a file it must exist.

You should note that try_files itself will not issue an internal redirect for anything but the last parameter. Meaning you cannot do the following: try_files $uri /cache.php @fallback; as that will cause nginx to set the internal file pointer to $document_root/cache.php and serve it, but since no internal redirect takes place the locations aren't re-evaluated and as such it will be served as plain text. (The reason it works with PHP files as the index is that the index directive will issue an internal redirect)

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.