Question

I’m trying to work on a single page app – I need to rewrite all urls to index.html but allow existing static files (.css and .js) to be served as they normally would be in a browser.

This is the code that I’m trying to use to re-write but it serves my static files to the re-write as well

if (!-e $request_filename)
{
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ /?/$1 last;
    break;
}

Answer 1

you don’t actually need a rewrite for that in nginx, just use try_files like so:

location / {
  try_files $uri /index.html;
}

what this does is for all url’s:

1. try the exact static filename match, and serve it if present
2. if 1 didn’t serve anything, then server /index.html instead

see http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#try_files