Use nginx to serve static files from subdirectories of a given directory

Question

I have several sets of static .html files on my server, and I would like use nginx to serve them directly. For example, nginx should serve an URI of the following pattern:

www.mysite.com/public/doc/foo/bar.html

with the .html file that is located at /home/www-data/mysite/public/doc/foo/bar.html. You can think of foo as the set name, and bar as the file name here.

I wonder whether the following piece of nginx config would do the job:

server {
    listen        8080;
    server_name   www.mysite.com mysite.com;
    error_log     /home/www-data/logs/nginx_www.error.log;
    error_page    404    /404.html;

    location /public/doc/ {
        autoindex         on;
        alias             /home/www-data/mysite/public/doc/;
    }

    location = /404.html {
        alias             /home/www-data/mysite/static/html/404.html;
    }
}

In other words, all requests of the pattern /public/doc/.../....html are going to be handled by nginx, and if any given URI is not found, a default www.mysite.com/404.html is returned.

score 141 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 21 '16 at 19:15

141

It should work, however http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#alias says:

When location matches the last part of the directive’s value: it is better to use the root directive instead:

which would yield:

server {
  listen        8080;
  server_name   www.mysite.com mysite.com;
  error_log     /home/www-data/logs/nginx_www.error.log;
  error_page    404    /404.html;

  location /public/doc/ {
    autoindex on;
    root  /home/www-data/mysite;
  } 

  location = /404.html {
    root /home/www-data/mysite/static/html;
  }       
}

edited Feb 21 '16 at 19:15

dipole_moment

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answered Oct 09 '12 at 19:43

cobaco

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1

Using 2 roots gave me problems in the past, what I usually do is use one root and alias for other locations as @AlessioCampanelli suggests – camposer Apr 11 '20 at 11:42
1

Using root is the right answer. However it does not serve the static pages for me. – bsesic Oct 12 '22 at 06:10

James Mwase · Answer 2 · 2023-04-01T11:05:45.380

You can use the following code. You can also use this code to serve vuejs or reactjs static files, Just modifile the alias to point to the root of your file directory;

location /files {
    #autoindex on;
    alias  /files;
    try_files $uri /index.html =404;
  }

Make sure the access permissions are right too. sudo chown -R 1000 /files

Example on how to access the files http://example.com/files/text-file.txt

Use nginx to serve static files from subdirectories of a given directory

2 Answers2

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