Nginx try_files not working with domain that appends trailing slash

Question

I have a dockerised Django app where nginx uses proxy_pass to send requests to the Django backend. I am looking to pre-publish certain pages that dont change often so Django doesnt have to deal with them.

I am trying to use try_files to check if that page exists locally and pass to Django if not.

Our URL structure requires that all URLs end with a forward slash and we dont use file type suffixes e.g. a page might be www.example.com/hello/. This means the $uri param in nginx in this instance is /hello/ and when try_files looks at that it is expecting a directory due to the trailing slash. If I have a directory with a list of files how do I get try_files to look at them without re-writing the URL to remove the slash as Django requires it?

My nginx conf is below.

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2 default_server;
    listen [::]:443 ssl http2 default_server;
    server_name example.com;

    root /home/testuser/example;

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

    location @site_root {
       proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:12345;
    }
}

If I have a file "hello" at /home/testuser/example/hello and call https://www.example.com/hello/ how can I get it to load the file correctly?

P.S. the permissions on the static content folder and its contents are all 777 (for now to rule out permissions issues)

Cheers in advance!

By default Nginx will try to return /home/testuser/example/hello/index.html. — Richard Smith
– Richard Smith, Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 19:06
@IvanStarostin I use the django cache atm, its too slow at scale though, requires a hit to redis and after 10k reqs per sec or so redis doesnt like that while nginx doesnt break a sweat — Miles
– Miles, Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 19:52
@RichardSmith Yeah thats the problem, how to I get it to just return "hello" or "hello.html" (as long as URL can still just be "/hello/" — Miles
– Miles, Commented Mar 8, 2020 at 19:52
There is a memcached plugin for Nginx which makes possible this scenario: Nginx tries to hit memcached, if key is missing it goes to Django, which generates the page, returns it as a response and stores into memcached cache; on next URL hit Nginx will obtain page from memcached and will not invoke Django. — IVNSTN
– IVNSTN, Commented Mar 9, 2020 at 12:26

Richard Smith · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-09 09:59:49Z

3

You can point the URI /hello/ to a local file called hello or hello.html using try_files, but you must first extract the filename using a regular expression location. See this document for details.

The advantage of using .html is that you will not need to provide the Content-Type of the response.

For example, using hello.html:

root /path/to/root;

location / {
    try_files $uri uri/ @site_root;
}
location ~ ^(?<filename>/.+)/$ {
    try_files $filename.html @site_root;
}
location @site_root {
   proxy_pass  ...;
}

If you prefer to store the local files without an extension, and they are all text/html, you will need to provide the Content-Type. See this document for details.

For example, using hello:

root /path/to/root;

location / {
    try_files $uri uri/ @site_root;
}
location ~ ^(?<filename>/.+)/$ {
    default_type text/html;
    try_files $filename @site_root;
}
location @site_root {
   proxy_pass  ...;
}

answered Mar 9, 2020 at 9:59

Richard Smith

50.3k7 gold badges97 silver badges96 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

3 Comments

Miles Over a year ago

Amazing! That works, thanks! Was bashing my head against this for hours!

suther Over a year ago

r.smith for president! Thanks a lot, you save my day!

RilDev Over a year ago

Thanks Richard! It works great! I replaced @site_root in the try_files with /404.html to have an easy "page not found" setup.

RilDev · Accepted Answer · 2022-08-12 17:50:05Z

0

In my case using NextJS, leaving the final slash causes errors.

So here is the solution I found to make it work nicely:

root /path/to/static/files/directory; # no trailing slash
rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent; # automatically remove the trailing slash

location / {
  try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/index.html /404.html;
  # try the provided uri
  # then try adding .html
  # then try uri/index.html (ex: homepage)
  # finally serve the 404 page
}

answered Aug 12, 2022 at 17:50

RilDev

3315 silver badges10 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Nginx try_files not working with domain that appends trailing slash

2 Answers 2

3 Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

3 Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related