Nginx Proxy to Files on Local Disk or S3

Question

So I'm moving my site away from Apache and onto Nginx, and I'm having trouble with this scenario:

User uploads a photo. This photo is resized, and then copied to S3. If there's suitable room on disk (or the file cannot be transferred to S3), a local version is kept.

I want requests for these images (such as http://www.mysite.com/p/1_1.jpg) to first look in the p/ directory. If no local file exists, I want to proxy the request out to S3 and render the image (but not redirect).

In Apache, I did this like so:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^p/([0-9]+_[0-9]+\.jpg)$ http://my_bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/$1 [P,L]

My attempt to replicate this behavior in Nginx is this:

location /p/ {
    if (-e $request_filename) {
        break;
    }
    proxy_pass http://my_bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/;
}

What happens is that every request attempts to hit Amazon S3, even if the file exists on disk (and if it doesn't exist on Amazon, I get errors.) If I remove the proxy_pass line, then requests for files on disk DO work.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Answer 1

Shouldn't this be an example of using try_files?

location /p/ {
    try_files $uri @s3;
}

location @s3{ 
    proxy_pass http://my_bucket.s3.amazonaws.com;
}

Make sure there isn't a following slash on the S3 url