Nginx fall-through urls with caching

Question

I have Rails app that has routes matching static files that are generated on first access.

Everything works fine if I have this block commented out in my site.conf:

 location ^~ /uploads/ {
    gzip_static on;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
  }

Is there a way to have best of both worlds and have location block to be only activated if the actual file exists and fall-through if it isn't? Maybe add try inside?

Answer 1

One of best practices to serve response based on logic "local disk static file vs. dynamic response with backend" is try_files:

location ^~ /uploads/ {
  gzip_static on;
  expires max;
  add_header Cache-Control public;
  try_files $uri @backend;
}

location @backend {
  proxy_pass ...
}

See official docs here.