Location not working for files but only for path

Question

I have a nginx.conf that looks like this:

server {
  ...
  root /var/opt/data/web;
  ...

  location ~* \.(?:eot|woff|woff2|ttf|js)$ {
    expires 1M;
  }

  ...

  location /one {
    root /var/opt/data/alternatives;
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
  }

  location /two {
    root /var/opt/data/alternatives;
    try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
  }
}

when I curl http://localhost/one/ I get the content of index.html stored in /other. But when I curl .../localhost/one/foo.js the file is not found and I get this in the error.log:

open() "/default/foo.js" failed (2: No such file or directory)

I tried other variants like location ~ (one|two), location /one/ or even location ~ /(one|two) but all of them didn't work.

The complete config consists of a lot more locations, but I guess the cause of my problem is the location where I set up .js resources to expire -1 because this prevents changing the root to what I need.

If this matters: I use nginx 1.15.2. In case you are wondering why I have this strange alternatives directory: the web directory is created by a CMS software while alternatives is git pulled.

Answer 1

nginx chooses a one location to process a request. Your location ~* \.(?:eot|woff|woff2|ttf|js)$ block processes any URI that ends with .js, and its root value is inherited from the outer block as /var/opt/data/web.

Where you have multiple roots, you need to ensure that those location blocks take precedence, by using the ^~ modifier. See this document for details.

For example:

server {
    ...
    root /var/opt/data/web;
    ...    
    location ~* \.(?:eot|woff|woff2|ttf|js)$ {
        expires 1M;
    }    
    ...
    location ^~ /one {
        root /var/opt/data/alternatives;
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

        location ~* \.(?:eot|woff|woff2|ttf|js)$ {
            expires 1M;
        }    
    }
    ...
}

If you need your expires rule to apply to the other roots, you will need to repeat the location within that scope, as shown above.

---

As an alternative, the expires directive can be used in conjunction with a map. See this document for details.

For example:

map $request_uri $expires {
    default                            off;
    ~*\.(eot|woff|woff2|ttf|js)(\?|$)  1M;
}
server {
    ...
    root /var/opt/data/web;
    expires $expires;
    ...
    location ^~ /one {
        root /var/opt/data/alternatives;
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
    ...
}