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content/posts/nginx-try_files-troubles.md

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+date = "2019-11-11"
+draft = false
+path = "/blog/nginx-try_files-troubles"
+tags = ["nginx"]
+title = "nginx: how to try multiple roots successively"
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+
+As part of developing this new version of this site, I've needed to mess with nginx a lot to switch from Ghost to Gatsby, especially when related to hosting files out of multiple directories.
+<!-- excerpt -->
+
+Specifically, this site is deployed by `rsync`ing the production version of the site onto the server behind `lfcode.ca`. I want to be able to use --delete to get rid of any old files for reliability reasons (don't want to rely on stuff that's not supposed to be there accidentally). Additionally, I am hosting static files at the root of `lfcode.ca`, which I don't want to manage with Gatsby.
+
+What this means is that I need the server to try in order:
+- serve the file from the Gatsby directory
+- attempt to serve it as a directory and return index.html
+- serve it from the untracked static files
+- 404
+
+There are countless StackOverflow posts on this exact issue, but for various reasons, they have their own issues.
+
+One popular suggestion is to set the `root` to some directory above both content directories then use something like `try_files dir1$uri dir1$uri/ dir2$uri =404;`. This works... nearly.
+
+It works properly for all direct paths, but the directory functionality is broken: it sends a 301 to the browser with `dir1/subdir/`, which, once followed, 404s since the nginx server will then try to serve `dir1/dir1/subdir/index.html` which it can't find. Further, this redirection behaviour seems not to be documented anywhere.
+
+The solution here is to just do `try_files dir1$uri dir1$uri/index.html dir2$uri =404;` and bypass the nginx index directive entirely.
+