Question

I have a Nginx config that works fine and serves static files properly:

location /static/ {
    alias /tmp/static/;
    expires 30d;
    access_log off;
}

But what I want to do now is that if the static file doesn’t exist in /tmp/static, Nginx looks for the file in /srv/www/site/static. I am not sure how to achieve that, I have tried a few things with try_files, but I don’t know how to properly use it.

Answer 1

You can set your root to the common prefix of the two paths you want to use (in this case, it’s /), then just specify the rest of the paths in the try_files args:

location /static/ {
  root /;
  try_files /tmp$uri /srv/www/site$uri =404;
  expires 30d;
  access_log off;
}

It may seem disconcerting to use root / in a location, but the try_files will ensure that no files outside of /tmp/static or /srv/www/site/static will be served.