Location block is ignored

Question

I testing out nginx but I bumped into a severe problem. Somehow the location tag doesn't catch my uri's. When the browser, or I manually try to access /favicon.ico on my localhost, it just throws an 404 error. The configuration looks like the following code:

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;
    root         www;

    #charset koi8-r;

    #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

location / {
    index    index.html index.php;
}

    location = /favicon.ico {
    alias alias /assets/images/favicon.ico;
}

... and the error log looks like this:

2014/01/17 00:05:18 [error] 7408#10036: *82 CreateFile() "C:\Users\user\Webb\nginx/www/favicon.ico" failed (2: FormatMessage() error:(15105)), client: 127.0.0.1, server: localhost, request: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1", host: "localhost"

The log proves then that the location block was ignored, because the path nginx look for the file is not the one alias points to.

Answer 1

AFAIK nginx alias goes like this:

alias <the base path>

means that with it you tell the nginx the part to the left of your first "/" in the URI.

example. suppose I have my images in /var/www/html/images and my application refers to apic.jpg as http://app.com/pictures/apic.jpg , what I do then is this:

location ^/pictures {
  alias /var/www/html/images;
}

hope this helps.