Question

I am trying to get cache-comtrol to work.

In nginx I have the following:

    location /static/ {
        alias /home/ubuntu/workspace/mysite;
        expires max;
        add_header Cache-Control public;
    }

in mysite dir I have static. In static I have the dirs for js, css, and images.

In the web browser I get 404 error. Images cant be found. If I remove location /static/ this site works but I have no cache-control.

How do I resolve?

Answer 1

If you use url like: http://your.page.com/static/image.gif then with your rules you get such uri (including alias directive):

/home/ubuntu/workspace/mysiteimage.gif;

So conclusion is that remove last / from location directive (it should be /static) or add at the end to alias directive / (so it will be as alias /home/ubuntu/workspace/mysite/;)

Other solution could be like:

location ~ (static/.*) {
   alias /home/ubuntu/workspace/mysite/$1;
   # ... rest of code here
}

Then you don’t have to add static again in alias directive. You just use it as location param ($1 = static/.*).

Why that way? alias directive (alias doc) work as follow: it trims from requested url part matched in location directive end then, with what will stay, append to it own rule path. In your example from url /static/image.gif/ it will trim /static/ and to your alias path append only image.gif so it will look like I wrote: /home/ubuntu/workspace/mysiteimage.gif/`.