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Trailing Slash in nginx has been giving me some sleepless nights lately. Requesting some help with this

Question : Strange trailing slash behavior in proxy_pass.

So why would this work :

location /myapi/ {
      proxy_pass   http://node_server8/;
    }

and this won't

location /myapi/ {
      proxy_pass   http://node_server8;
    }

Notice the missing trailing slash at the end of http://node_server8 in second code block. This is specially strange as I have a few other configurations where I don't have a trailing slash on the backend and all works fine.

Utopia
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1 Answers1

9

They are totally different.

In the first proxy_pass statement you have included a URI parameter with a value of /. In the second you haven't.

When you give proxy_pass a URI parameter (within a prefix location), it transforms the requested URI similarly to the alias function, whereby the value of the location directive is substituted for the value of the URI parameter. For example /myapi/foo becomes /foo before being passed upstream.

If you do not provide proxy_pass with a URI parameter, no transformation takes place, and the request /myapi/foo is passed upstream unchanged.

See this document for details.

Richard Smith
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  • Thanks Richard. But then how is it that it works just fine without the trailing `/` for some of my other back end nginx configurations... I am probably missing something here. – Utopia Dec 06 '18 at 14:35
  • The configurations are different and presumably the requirements of the other backends are different too. – Richard Smith Dec 06 '18 at 14:44