I can't get my head round why my nginx config keeps looking for files in the wrong directory.

I'm trying to map the /files location to /home/user/toto. For that I'm using a regex capture group to remove the /files prefix and search for the files in the directory specified in the root directive.

        server {
                listen 80;
                server_name localhost;

                location ~^\/files\/(.*)$ {
                        root /home/user/toto;
                        try_files /$1/ /$1 ;
                        autoindex off;
                }
       }

The problem is I only get 404s. And that's pretty normal because here is what we can find in error.log :

2022/07/17 11:27:49 [error] 40358#0: *40 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/test.txt" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 127.0.0.1, server: localhost, request: "GET /files/test.txt HTTP/1.1", host: "localhost"

As we can see the root directive seems to be completely ignored.

I tried an alternative configuration such as :

        server {
                listen 80;
                server_name localhost;

                location ~^\/files\/(.*)$ {
                        # root /home/user/toto;
                        try_files /home/user/toto/$1/ /home/user/toto/$1 ;
                        autoindex off;
                }
       }

But the problem is still the same. The only change is that the path now appears in the logs as a prefix for the file name :

2022/07/17 11:12:02 [error] 40288#0: *36 open() "/usr/local/nginx/html/home/user/toto/test.txt" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 127.0.0.1, server: localhost, request: "GET /files/test.txt HTTP/1.1", host: "localhost"

What am I missing ?

CodePudding user response：

Your missing the last parameter from the try_files directive, so that the /$1 is being interpreted as an internal redirect instead of a file term.

Use:

try_files /$1/ /$1 =404;

See this document for details.