Understanding location blocks and try files

[Valentin V. Bartenev]

On Wednesday 22 January 2014 21:07:13 Jonathan Matthews wrote:
[..]
> ... and its this last step which isn't working as expected. I don't
> quite have the explanation or docs to hand to say why this won't work,
> but this SO page seems to have an interestingly un-up-voted answer at
> the bottom of the page:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13138318/nginx-try-files-outside-location
> 
> "You are probably under the delusion that try_files on server level
> must work for every request. Not at all. Quite the contrary, it works
> only for requests that match no location blocks."
> 
> I'd be really interested to get confirmation that that statement is
> unequivocally true!
> 

Well, actually I wrote this answer.  So, I can confirm. =)

You may also find confirmations by Igor and Maxim by searching
through the mailing list.

There is a bit of history:
http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2009-March/010749.html
http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2011-June/027502.html
http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2012-June/034389.html

Changes with nginx 0.7.44                                        23 Mar 2009

    *) Feature: the "try_files" directive is now allowed on the server block
       level.

but, personally I think it was a bad decision that eventually resulted to a 
lot of confusion around.
 

 wbr, Valentin V. Bartenev