alias vs root in regex location

[Francis Daly]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 07:09:43PM -0400, avi9526 wrote:

Hi there,

> Trying to serve nagios web GUI through nginx.

> location ~ "^/nagios/(.+?\.php)(/.*)?$"
> {
> 	alias		"/usr/share/nagios3/htdocs/";
> 	try_files	$1 $uri $uri/	/nagios/index.php;

> location ~* ^/cgi-bin/nagios3/(.+?\.cgi)$
> {
> 	alias		"/usr/lib/cgi-bin/nagios3/";
> 	try_files	$1 $uri $uri/	=404;

> it's seems to be working. If i change "alias" to "root" and uncomment
> "rewrite" directive for both php and cgi scripts it will work as well. So,
> what the difference?

http://nginx.org/r/root and http://nginx.org/r/alias.

Note that "alias" and "try_files" do have some unobvious interactions,
especially in a regex location. See http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/97
for some details.

Your configuration works because of your non-typical "try_files"
directive. I suspect that not all of the four arguments are ever used --
but it does depend on the incoming request, the files on the file system,
and how you want them to be matched together.

> And why most online manuals suggests to use "root"
> followed by rewrite?

I don't see that.

I see some suggesting root and rewrite; and some suggesting root; and
some suggesting alias.

I suspect that it depends on where things are installed.

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org