How to serve a directory of static files at a certain location path with nginx?

Question

I have files at /Users/me/myproject and I want to serve them at http://stuff.dev/something using a simple nginx config. In the /Users/me/myproject folder is something like:

index.html
scripts/
    app.js
styles/
    style.css

So I really want to be able to access http://stuff.dev/something, http://stuff.dev/something/scripts/app.js etc.

In my nginx conf I have this:

server {
  listen      80;
  server_name stuff.dev;

  location /something {
    index  index.html;
    root /Users/me/myproject;
  }
}

This doesn't work (I get a 404 if I try to go to those above URLs), however if I try the exact same set up but using location / { instead of location /something {, it works fine. How can I serve this directory of files statically but at a path instead of at the location root? Do I have to have the files in a folder called "something" like /Users/me/myproject/something for this to work? If so is there a way around that?

Answer 1

I tried this out on my VPS, and using the alias command worked for me:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name   something.nateeagle.com;

  location /something {
    alias /home/neagle/something;
    index index.html index.htm;
  }
}

Answer 2

I believe you can accomplish this with the try_files directive, something like this should work:

server {
  listen      80;
  server_name stuff.dev;

  location /something {
    root /Users/me/myproject;
    index  index.html;

    try_files /Users/me/myproject/$uri /Users/me/myproject/$uri/ =404
  }
}

That might require you to shove files under /Users/me/myproject/something, and if you can't get away with that, you'll need to try something like the following for the location:

  location ~ /something(.*) {
    root /Users/me/myproject;
    index  index.html;

    try_files /Users/me/myproject$1 /Users/me/myproject$1/ =404
  }