Serving static files statically with GET, everything else to backend

[michelem]

Hello folks,

Maybe this will save some time to someone.

I have a setup where I serve a web application as follows:

* server A with nginx handles directly as much static content as possible
* only requests for URLs requesting dynamic processing go to server B
hosting the application server

This improves performance and keeps the presentational content online if the
application server fails.

nginx' try_files takes you 95% there: just put on A a filesystem hierarchy
containing the static contents.
The missing 5% is how to serve pages containing forms posting to themselves.
This means, the same
URL gets served statically upon GETs or HEADs, and dynamically otherwise.

Here's the gist of a working setup for this (sorry if the forum messes up
formatting):

server {
   root /var/www/www.foobar.com/;      # put files for static content here

    location / {
        error_page 405 = @appsrv;
        # remove if() and @appsrv will get as $uri the last try of
try_files
        if ($request_method != GET) { return 405; }
        try_files $uri $uri/ $uri/index.html @appsrv;
    }

    # pass everything to FastCGI
    location @appsrv { fastcgi_pass 173.244.206.26:9003; }
}

cheers
michele

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,247532,247532#msg-247532