Nginx Location Configuration (Subfolders)

Nginx location configuration (subfolders)

To access a path like /var/www/mysite/manage/public with a URI like /manage, you will need to use alias rather than root. See this document for details.

I am assuming that you need to run PHP from both roots, in which case you will need two location ~ \.php blocks, see example below. If you have no PHP within /var/www/mysite/static, you can delete the unused location block.

For example:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name  example.org;
    error_log /usr/local/etc/nginx/logs/mysite/error.log;
    access_log /usr/local/etc/nginx/logs/mysite/access.log;

    root /var/www/mysite/static;
    index index.html;

    location / {
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
    }

    location ^~ /manage {
        alias /var/www/mysite/manage/public;
        index index.php;

        if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite ^ /manage/index.php last; }

        location ~ \.php$ {
            if (!-f $request_filename) { return 404; }
            fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
        }
    }
}

The ^~ modifier causes the prefix location to take precedence over regular expression locations at the same level. See this document for details.

The alias and try_files directives are not together due to this long standing bug.

Be aware of this caution in the use of the if directive.

How to make root directory subfolders available through nginx?

Since nobody was able to reply to me, here's how I finally got it working.

My FIRST ISSUE was with permissions and file ownership:

/var/www was owned by the root user and group, as were all its subdirectories and files. nginx thus wasn't able to read any file - even if configured right -, except weirdly my index.html from /var/www/my-site (which I don't quite understand as of now).

To remedy this, I first changed the owner and group of /var/www/my-site and all its subdirectories and files to www-data, instead of root. www-data seems to be the default user, defined by nginx. It should be specified at the top of the nginx.conf from /etc/nginx as user www-data.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/my-site

After that I also set the SetGID permission flags s for the www-data group and the /var/www/my-site directory and its subdirectories (not the files though).

sudo chmod g+s /var/www/my-site /var/www/my-site/images /var/www/my-site/css

This means that all future files, created in /var/www/my-site and its subdirectories will get the group ownership applied to them (not any new subdirectories though).

Now, I still needed to allow the new group to write to /var/www/my-site and its subdirectories with the appropriate permissions (i.e. rwxrwxrx = 775):

sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/my-site

Lastly, I added myself - the non-root user - to the www-data group, in order to be able to upload (or write) files with for instance SFTP.

sudo usermod -a -G www-data [my username]

a means "append", and -G www-data "to the existing group www-data".

My SECOND ISSUE was in the my-site.net config from /etc/nginx/sites-available, which was initially copied from /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.

Turns out that in my case, I only needed to specify the relevant subdirectories of /var/www/my-site, which is the nginx root (cf. server {...} block), as locations.

I already had /var/www/my-site/images set up with this snippet that is meant to prevent hot or deep linking of images:

location /images/ {
    valid_referers none blocked www.my-site.net my-site.net;
    if ($invalid_referer) {
        return 403;
    }
}

All that remained was to specify another location for /var/www/my-site/css:

location /css/ {

}

Finally, I saved the config and reloaded nginx and everything worked!

Nginx set root to subfolder

If your directory structure follows your URI structure, you should probably set the root to /var/www/html at the server level and use /var/www/html/download for one location only.

For example:

server {
    ...
    root /var/www/html;

    location / {
        root /var/www/html/download;
        fancyindex on;
    }
    location /account/ {
        ... # PHP stuff
    }
    location /css/ { }
    location /js/ { }
    location = /robots.txt { }
    location = /terms.html { }

The last four blocks can be empty, as they inherit the value of root from the surrounding block. See this document for details.

nginx: location of static content within a subfolder

I figured it out myself. Deleting everything out of the location /memorygame block did the trick. Nginx does what I was trying to achieve by default.

nginx location with unknown subfolder depth

If you set the root like in your example to /var/www/html/public/image, then a request to /image/user/foo.jpg will end up at /var/www/html/public/image/image/user/foo.jpg which is undesired. So I don't think you should touch root (it must stay pointed to public dir).

Simply:

location ^/image/.*/.*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|css|ico)$ {
    expires 30d;
}

will do the job.

If your filenames are somehow hashed/versioned (e.g. foo.123.jpg), you can use immutable for aggressive caching:

location ^/image/.*/.*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|css|ico)$ {
    immutable on;
}

Setup example.com/subdirectory/ in Nginx

Put the following into server section:

location /subdirectory {
   root /var/www/site/web;
}

Or other solution which is working when /url_directory and /local_directory doesn't equal:

location /subdirectory {
   alias /var/www/site/web/subdirectory;
}

See more on nginx/location, nginx/root and nginx/alias.

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