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I'm testing a setup where I'd like to have nginx serve up static media and proxy all other requests to another backend. My configuration looks like this:

location /media    {alias /var/httpd/media;}
location /         {proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;}

However, if a request is made for a non-existing media resource, e.g. /media/foo.js, nginx tries looking for /var/httpd/media/foo.js and then when not found it also tries to proxy the request to 127.0.0.1:8080. Here are the nginx error logs:

2012/05/18 17:09:21 [error] 10073#0: *1 open() "/var/httpd/media/foo.js" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 127.0.0.1, server: www.example.com, request: "GET /media/foo.js HTTP/1.1", host: "www.example.com"
2012/05/18 17:09:21 [error] 10073#0: *1 connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: www.example.com, request: "GET /media/foo.js HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://127.0.0.1:8080/media/foo.js", host: "www.example.com"

Additionally, I notice that if /var/httpd/media/foo.js does exist but is not readable by the process running nginx, then nginx does not attempt to proxy to http://127.0.0.1:8080 and returns a 403 Forbidden. Error log:

2012/05/18 17:09:33 [error] 10073#0: *1 open() "/var/httpd/media/foo.js" failed (13: Permission denied), client: 127.0.0.1, server: www.example.com, request: "GET /media/foo.js HTTP/1.1", host: "www.example.com"

Why does the first scenario cause both location blocks to be processed and the second scenario only cause the media location block to be processed? How can I make the first scenario only process the media location block and not attempt to proxy to the backend?

Note: I also tried adding a ^~ prefix to the media location block:

location ^~ /media    {alias /var/httpd/media;}

...but this did not change nginx's behavior, as it continued to drop into the / block after failing in the /media block.

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I guess you have error_page 404 set to somewhere in second location

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  • Excellent guess, this was exactly the problem! I guess I'd need move the URI of the error files to their own location that gets picked up by a specific location directive to not be handled by proxy_pass, though unfortunately since location directives can't be inside of http directives (only server directives according to the docs) I'd need to include that error location directive into every http directive in every included config.
    – Gary
    May 21, 2012 at 14:52

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