Question

I have a nginx + thin + Rails 3.2 setup. Currently I am trying to setup nginx so it can serve cached pages directly.

However nginx still pass *.html request to Rails in the following nginx configuration files. The html files exists in public folder, and nginx does find them, just that they are still passed to Rails.

upstream site {
  server unix:/home/site/deploy/site/shared/pids/thin.0.sock;
}

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name www.example.com;
  rewrite ^(/.*) http://example.com$1 permanent;
}

# asset server
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name assets.example.com;
  expires max;
  add_header Cache-Control public;
  charset utf-8;
  root   /home/site/deploy/site/current/public/;
}

# frontend
server {
  listen 80;
  server_name .example.com;
  charset utf-8;

  root   /home/site/deploy/site/current/public/;
  index  index.html;

  location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|swf|zip|rar|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar)$ {
    root /home/site/deploy/site/current/public/;
    expires max;
    break;
  }

  # serve static files
  if (-f $request_filename) {
    break;
  }

  gzip on;

  location / {
    proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_redirect off;

    if (-f $request_filename) {
      break;
    }

    if (-f $document_root/cache/$host/$uri/index.html) {
      rewrite (.*) /cache/$host/$1/index.html break;
    }

    if (-f $document_root/cache/$host/$uri.html) {
      rewrite (.*) /cache/$host/$1.html break;
    }

    if (-f $document_root/cache/$host/$uri) {
      rewrite (.*) /cache/$host/$1 break;
    }

    proxy_pass http://site;
    break;
  }
}

I am new to nginx, and this configuration file is copied from previous projects I have not worked on, so this is probably a very newbie question.

Answer 1

To allow nginx to serve static cached pages you need to use try_files, let me share the config:

upstream site {
  server          unix:/home/site/deploy/site/shared/pids/thin.0.sock fail_timeout=0;
}

server {
  listen          80;
  server_name     www.example.com;
  rewrite ^(/.*)  http://example.com$1 permanent;
}

server {
  listen          80;
  server_name     example.com;
  charset         utf-8;

  root            /home/site/deploy/site/current;
  try_files       $uri/index.html $uri @thin;

  gzip on;

  location @thin {
    proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header  Host $http_host;
    proxy_redirect    off;
    proxy_pass        http://site;
  }

  location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|swf|zip|rar|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar)$ {
    root             /home/site/deploy/site/current/public/;
    expires          max;
    break;
  }
}