There is a very important difference between the root and the alias directives. This difference exists in the way the path specified in the root or the alias is processed.
In case of the root directive, full path is appended to the root including the location part, whereas in case of the alias directive, only the portion of the path NOT including the location part is appended to the alias.
To illustrate…
Let’s say we have the config
location /static/ {
root /var/www/app/static/;
autoindex off;
}
In this case the final path that Nginx will derive will be
/var/www/app/static/static
This is going to return 404 since there is no static/ within static/
This is because the location part is appended to the path specified in the root. Hence, with root, the correct way is
location /static/ {
root /var/www/app/;
autoindex off;
}
On the other hand, with alias, the location part gets dropped. So for the config
location /static/ {
alias /var/www/app/static/;
autoindex off;
}
the final path will correctly be formed as
/var/www/app/static
See the documentation here: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#alias
References:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10631933/nginx-static-file-serving-confusion-with-root-alias
innopy 