How to serve static files with nginx inside of a docker container?

Question

I\'m using boot2docker since I\'m running Mac OSX. I can\'t figure out how serve up static files using nginx that is running inside a docker container (that also contains the st

Answer 1

Your issue isn't related to docker but to your nginx configuration.

In your nginx config file, you define /var/www/ as the document root (I guess to serve your static files). But below that you instruct nginx to act as a reverse proxy to your node app for all requests.

Because of that, if you call the /index.html URL, nginx won't even bother checking the content of /var/www and will forward that query to nodejs.

Usually you want to distinguish requests for static content from requests for dynamic content by using a URL convention. For instance, all requests starting with /static/ will be served by nginx while anything else will be forwarded to node. The nginx config file would then be:

worker_processes auto;

daemon off;

events {
  worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
  server_tokens off;
  upstream node-app {
    ip_hash;
    server 192.168.59.103:5000;
  }
  server {
    listen 80;

    location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
      expires 1d;
    }

    location /static/ {
      alias /var/www/;
      index index.html;
    }

    location / {
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
      proxy_set_header Host $host;
      proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
      proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
      proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;

      proxy_http_version 1.1;
      proxy_pass http://node-app;
      proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }

  }
}