Question

I would like to have a default robots.txt file served from a shared place (absolute path), if there’s no relative one.

I tried this without luck:

location = /robots.txt {
    expires 30d;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
    try_files /robots.txt /var/www/shared/robots.txt =404;
}

But it just returns 404.

Answer 1

I ended up with this which seems to work:

location = /robots.txt {
    expires 30d;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
    try_files /robots.txt @shared;
}

location @shared {
    root /var/www/shared;
}

I must admit though, that I liked “try_files” better, but it just doesn’t seem to work with absolute paths.

If anyone has a better/other solution, I would love to see!