Nginx reverse proxy Serving Node.js app static file - node.js

Question

I have a Laravel application in which one route /onlineAds will take me to another application (an SPA one) built with Vue.Js as front and Node.js as Back. So I'm trying to use Nginx as a reverse proxy in order to serve my SpaApp's static files but without any success.
My conf is as follow:
/ => will be serverd from "C:/laragon/www/laravel_App/public/"
/onlineAds/(*) => will be serverd from "C:/laragon/www/VueNodeApp/dist/"
/api/(*) => will be proxied to nodeJs server
Here is what I tried to do with Nginx:
server {
listen 8080;
server_name domain.test *.domain.test;
root "C:/laragon/www/laravel_App/public/";
index index.html index.htm index.php;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
autoindex on;
}
location ~* ^\/onlineAds(.*)$ {
alias "C:/laragon/www/craiglist/dist/";
#try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
location ~* ^\/api(.*)$ {
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
proxy_read_timeout 300;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8081;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass php_upstream;
#fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
}
charset utf-8;
location = /favicon.ico { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location = /robots.txt { access_log off; log_not_found off; }
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
}
What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

An alias statement within a regular expression location requires the full path to the file. See this document for details.
For example:
location ~* ^\/onlineAds(.*)$ {
alias "C:/laragon/www/craiglist/dist$1";
if (!-e $request_filename) { rewrite ^ /onlineAds/index.html last; }
}
The use of try_files with alias is avoided due to this issue. See this caution on the use of if.
Assuming that the URI /js/foo.js could be located in C:/laragon/www/laravel_App/public/js/foo.js or C:/laragon/www/craiglist/dist/js/foo.js, you could ask Nginx to try both locations using try_files with a common root directory.
For example:
location /js/ {
root "C:/laragon/www";
try_files /laravel_App/public$uri /craiglist/dist$uri =404;
}
location /css/ {
root "C:/laragon/www";
try_files /laravel_App/public$uri /craiglist/dist$uri =404;
}