How to correct my nginx configuration if it is wrong?

Question

I am new to nginx. I try to learn using search www and stackoverflow. Mostly I get help to understand how to build my nginx configuration.

I have my domain as www.mysite.com. Everything; landing page, the error and server error must be redirect to default index.html. I also define my access and error log. All this done (below code) inside the /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf.

I need to redirect (proxy_pass) /admin, /user and anything related to them. Example the /admin has also different folder like /admin/login/. I need to everything after /admin must be redirected. The same goes also for the /user as well.

1) Looking at my code am I redirect the location /admin and location /user correctly?

2) I also use try_files $uri $uri/ =404; in redirection. which also redirects the 404 to default index.html. Am I doing right?

3) I am also denying access to some file and folder. Am I doing right?

My main question is How to correct my nginx configuration if it is wrong? So to understand the correct nginx configuration I divide my question to 3 different question above. I hope I didnt brake stackoverflow how to ask question guidelines.

Thank you.

UPDATE:

server {
    charset UTF-8;
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    server_name www.mysite.com;
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/host.access.log  main;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/host.error.log  main;

    # define a root location variable and assign a value
    set $rootLocation /usr/share/nginx/html;

    # define www.mysite.com landing page to the static index.html page
    location / {
        root   rootLocation;
        index  index.html index.htm;
    }

    # define error page to the static index.html page
    error_page 404  /index.html;
    location = /index.html {
        root rootLocation;
        internal;
    }

    # redirect server error pages to the static index.html page
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /index.html;
    location = /index.html {
        root   rootLocation;
        internal;
    }

    # redirect www.mysite.com/admin to localhost
    # /admin or /admin/ or /admin/**** must be redirect to localhost
    location /admin {
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass "http://127.0.0.1:3000";
    }

    # redirect www.mysite.com/user to localhost
    # /user or /user/ or /user/**** must be redirect to localhost   
    location /user {
        proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header   Host $http_host;
        proxy_pass "http://127.0.0.1:3001";
    }
}

Answer 1

It is usual to place the root statement once in the server block, rather than repeat the same value in multiple location blocks.

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You are using proxy_pass to change the URI before passing it upstream. In this case, the location value and the URI part of the proxy_pass value should either both end with / or neither end with /. See this document for details.

Usually you do not want to place try_files and proxy_pass in the same location. This causes Nginx to check for the existence of the file in its document root before allowing the request to pass upstream.

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You should not need to deny access to the configuration files, as these file should not be within the document root in the first place.