How to prevent nginx from reverse proxy specific subdirectories

Question

On Apache you can ProxyPass everything except one or more subdirectories (with "!").

    ProxyPass /subdir !
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:9999/

What is the Nginx equivalent ?

My first guess is obviously not working :

 location /subdir {
      root /var/www/site/subdir;
  }

 location / {
      proxy_pass http://localhost:9999/ ;
  }

Solution

You can bind the proxy_pass to EXACTLY the path you like, like this

location = / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:9999/;
}

This makes sure that no other path will be passed but /

OR

you can use this syntax for just the subdirectories to be matched

location ^~ /subdir {
     alias /var/www/site/subdir;
}

location / {
    proxy_pass http://localhost:9999/ ;
}

The ^~ matches the subdir and then stops searching so the / will not be executed. It is described here.

Comments

[Tinus]

root /var/www/site/subdir should be root /var/www/site in my case, otherwise nginx will try to access /var/www/site/subdir/subdir .

[Christopher Perrin]

You are right. Either that, or you can use alias instead of root

[Mohammed Noureldin]

Could you explain this ^~ more? I could not get what does it do. I tried reading the link you sent, but still cannot get it. If the longest matching prefix location has the “^~” modifier then regular expressions are not checked.

[Christopher Perrin]

@MohammedNoureldin it essentially means that it tries to match a prefix on a path and does not evaluate regular expressions.

[Mohammed Noureldin]

Actually my problem is with this word prefix: does it here mean the fix string (simple non-regex string)?

[Christopher Perrin]

@MohammedNoureldin it is the first part of the path that you want to use for the location. And yes it is without regex.