hosting vue.js and codeignitor with nginx - codeigniter

Question

I have 2 folders dist and api_middleware in '/var/www/public_html/website.com/'
dist folder contains my frontend production code. This folder is symblink-ed from /home/user/frontend/dist
api_middleware folder contains codeignitor code, that we use as middleware for frontend to communicate with our erp. This folder is symblink-ed from /home/user/api_middleware.
I want to host both code with nginx. And this is the code that I came up with.
server {
listen 443;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/website.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/website.com.key;
server_name website.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/nginx.vhost.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/nginx.vhost.error.log;
index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
location / {
root /var/www/public_html/website.com/dist;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
location /api_middleware {
root /var/www/public_html/website.com;
try_files $uri $uri/ /api_middleware/index.php?/$request_uri;
client_max_body_size 100M;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
}
}
navigating to website.com works. But the api calls with website.com\api_middleware\<PARAMS> is returning a 404
What am I doing wrong?
PS. Using ubuntu 18.4.

Answer 1

My Updated working code:
server {
listen 443;
ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/website.com.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/website.com.key;
server_name website.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/nginx.vhost.access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/nginx.vhost.error.log;
root /var/www/public_html/website.com/dist;
index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
location /api_middleware {
alias /var/www/public_html/website.com/api_middleware/;
try_files $uri $uri/ /api_middleware/api_middleware/index.php?/$request_uri;
client_max_body_size 100M;
}
location ~ /api_middleware/.+\.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
}
}
The issue was that using multiple root was messing with nginx to access the directory location my second codebase.
I used alias to change the location to search for my 2nd codebase, while using root to set location of my 1st codebase.
Take a look at the line try_files $uri $uri/ /api_middleware/api_middleware/index.php?/$request_uri;. I have added 'api_middleware' twice here, even though the location to index.php file is /var/www/public_html/website.com/api_middleware/index.php . This is needed because of a very old bug in nginx.
finally, to process the php files, I changed the URI where to look for the php files to ~ /api_middleware/.+\.php$.
Reference:
NGINX try_files + alias directives
https://serverfault.com/questions/1035733/nginx-difference-between-root-and-alias
https://serverfault.com/questions/684523/nginx-multiple-roots/684605