How to serve all existing static files directly with NGINX but proxy the rest to a backend server

Question

location         proxy set header X-Real-IP   remote addr      proxy set header Host  host      proxy set header X-Forwarded-For  proxy add x forwarded for       if  -f  request filename            access log off          expires 30d          break                 if   -f  request filename            proxy pass http   127 0 0 1 8080    backend server listening         break                    Above will serve all existing files directly using Nginx  e g  Nginx just displays PHP source code   otherwise forward a request to Apache  I need to exclude   php files from the rule so that requests for   php are also passed to Apache and processed   I want Nginx to handle all static files and Apache to process all dynamic stuff   EDIT  There is white list approach  but it is not very elegant  See all those extensions  I don t want this   location         jpg jpeg gif png ico css zip tgz gz rar bz2 doc xls exe pdf ppt txt tar mid midi wav bmp rtf js         access log off      expires 30d        location         proxy set header X-Real-IP   remote addr      proxy set header Host  host      proxy set header X-Forwarded-For  proxy add x forwarded for      proxy pass http   127 0 0 1 8080          EDIT 2  On newer versions of Nginx use try files instead http   wiki nginx org HttpCoreModule try files

User · Answer

Try this   location         root  path to root      expires 30d      access log off     location         php        if   -f  request filename            return 404            proxy set header X-Real-IP   remote addr      proxy set header Host  host      proxy set header X-Forwarded-For  proxy add x forwarded for      proxy pass http   127 0 0 1 8080      Hopefully it works  Regular expressions have higher priority than plain strings  so all requests ending in  php should be forwared to Apache if only a corresponding  php file exists  Rest will be handled as static files  The actual algorithm of evaluating location is here

User · Answer

Use try files and named location block    apachesite    This will remove unnecessary regex match and if block  More efficient   location         root  path to root of static files      try files  uri  uri   apachesite       expires max      access log off     location  apachesite       proxy set header X-Real-IP   remote addr      proxy set header Host  host      proxy set header X-Forwarded-For  proxy add x forwarded for      proxy pass http   127 0 0 1 8080      Update  The assumption of this config is that there doesn t exist any php script under  path to root of static files  This is common in most modern php frameworks  In case your legacy php projects have both php scripts and static files mixed in the same folder  you may have to whitelist all of the file types you want nginx to serve

User · Answer

If you use mod rewrite to hide the extension of your scripts  or if you just like pretty URLs that end in    then you might want to approach this from the other direction  Tell nginx to let anything with a non-static extension to go through to apache  For example   location          jpg jpeg gif png ico css zip tgz gz rar bz2 pdf txt tar wav bmp rtf js flv swf html htm         root    path to static-content     location           jpg jpeg gif png ico css zip tgz gz rar bz2 pdf txt tar wav bmp rtf js flv swf html htm         if   -f  request filename            return 404            proxy set header X-Real-IP   remote addr      proxy set header Host  host      proxy set header X-Forwarded-For  proxy add x forwarded for      proxy pass http   127 0 0 1 8080      I found the first part of this snippet over at  http   code google com p scalr wiki NginxStatic

[nginx] How to serve all existing static files directly with NGINX, but proxy the rest to a backend server.

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