nginx: How to return content from other URL without redirect?

Question

I currently have the following configuration in nginx:

    location ~* .(png|gif|ico|jpg|jpeg|css|js|svg|woff2|ttf)(\?.*)?$ {
        proxy_pass http://nodejs;
    }

    location / {
      return 302 /;
    }

This results in all URLs except for known static files to be redirected to the root.

However, I was wondering if it's possible to have nginx just reverse proxy the content of root with a 200, rather than perform a redirect?

Note that try_files /; instead of return 302 /; based on some other question/answer didn't work, not sure if that's exactly what I should've tried or not. (Is try_files based on the local file system?? Not applicable here.)

Answer 1

The directive proxy_pass can be applied per location, so you configure every location to fetch its content from a different back end server.