Nginx Reverse Proxying to Node.js with Rewrite
I have made nginx serve static files without even passing those requests to node by adding location directive to the app's nginx configuration file (which is included in nginx.conf):
location ~ /(img|js)/ { rewrite ^(.*)$ /public/$1 break;}location / { proxy_pass http://localhost:3000/; ...}In case request comes to /img or /js directory nginx serves files from /public/img or /public/js directory respectively. All other requests are proxied to node.
You can add more directories if you need (like /css or /views, if you store templates there that you want to use both in node and in browser) and have any directory structure inside those directories, nginx just prepends /public to them and gets files from there without your node app even knowing about it.