Question

I have mediawiki installed. All is right in the world except for when I try to alias a external directory (webalizer web stats). I see that Nginx passes off the request to /usage/* to PHP/Mediawiki. I don’t want that. I literally want everything under /usage/ to point to my alias and nothing else. Completely separate from Mediawiki code and functionality.

# in no way related to Mediawiki. I just want to serve this as static HTML.
location /usage {
    alias /var/www/webalizer/wiki.longnow.org/;
}

# This answers to anything, which may be my problem
location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite;
    index index.php;
}

# A special rewrite to play nicely with Mediawiki
location @rewrite {
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1&$args;
}

# PHP, nom nom nom
location ~ \.php$ {
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php-fastcgi.socket;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}

I was hoping that listing the /usage location directive ahead of the rest would short-circuit the system, but I have been spoiled by Django 😉

Answer 1

To stop Nginx from processing further location directives, it should be prefixed by ^~.
I think you will still want a try_files falling back to a 404 response inside the location.

location ^~ /usage {
    alias /var/www/webalizer/wiki.longnow.org/;
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;    
}

See http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location for reference.