serving static files from jwilder/nginx-proxy

Question

I have a web app (django served by uwsgi) and I am using nginx for proxying requests to specific containers. Here is a relevant snippet from my default.conf.

upstream web.ubuntu.com {
server 172.18.0.9:8080;
}
server {
server_name web.ubuntu.com;
listen 80 ;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log vhost;
location / {
include uwsgi_params;
uwsgi_pass uwsgi://web.ubuntu.com;
}
}

Now I want the static files to be served from nginx rather than uwsgi workers.

So basically I want to add something like:

location /static/ {
autoindex on;
alias /staticfiles/;
}

to the automatically generated server block for the container.

I believe this should make nginx serve all requests to web.ubuntu.com/static/* from /staticfiles folder.

But since the configuration(default.conf) is generated automatically, I don't know how to add the above location to the server block dynamically :(

I think location block can't be outside a server block right and there can be only one server block per server?

so I don't know how to add the location block there unless I add dynamically to default.conf after nginx comes up and then reload it I guess.

I did go through https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy and I only see an example to actually change location settings per-host and default. But nothing about adding a new location altogether.

I already posted this in Q&A for jwilder/nginx-proxy and didn't get a response.

Please help me if there is a way to achieve this.

Answer 1

This answer is based on this comment from the #553 issue discussion on the official nginx-proxy repo. First, you have to create the default_location file with the static location:

location /static/ {
    alias /var/www/html/static/;
}

and save it, for example, into nginx-proxy folder in your project's root directory. Then, you have to add this file to /etc/nginx/vhost.d folder of the jwilder/nginx-proxy container. You can build a new image based on jwilder/nginx-proxy with this file being copied or you can mount it using volumes section. Also, you have to share static files between your webapp and nginx-proxy containers using a shared volume. As a result, your docker-compose.yml file will look something like this:

version: "3"

services:
  nginx-proxy:
    image: jwilder/nginx-proxy
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro
      - ./nginx-proxy/default_location:/etc/nginx/vhost.d/default_location
      - static:/var/www/html/static

  webapp:
    build: ./webapp
    expose:
      - 8080
    volumes:
      - static:/path/to/webapp/static
    environment:
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=webapp.docker.localhost
      - VIRTUAL_PORT=8080
      - VIRTUAL_PROTO=uwsgi

volumes:
  static:

Now, the server block in /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf will always include the static location:

server {
    server_name webapp.docker.localhost;
    listen 80 ;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log vhost;
    location / {
        include uwsgi_params;
        uwsgi_pass uwsgi://webapp.docker.localhost;
        include /etc/nginx/vhost.d/default_location;
    }
}

which will make Nginx serve static files for you.