NGINX in front of TOMCAT to serve static files - macos

Question

I'm working on a project with grails 2.2.2 on a local machine Mac OSX Lion 10.7.5 I have installed NGINX with brew and modified the nginx.conf as following :
worker_processes 1;
error_log logs/error.log info;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
'$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
'"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
access_log logs/access.log main;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
server {
listen 8081;
server_name localhost;
root /;
access_log /Users/lorenzo/grails/projects/logs/myproject_access.log;
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8081;
}
#images folders
location /posters {
root /Users/lorenzo/grails/projects/posters/;
}
#images folders
location /avatars {
root /Users/lorenzo/grails/projects/avatars/;
}
#images folders
location /waveforms {
root /Users/lorenzo/grails/projects/waveforms/;
}
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root html;
}
}
When I access http://localhost:8081 my site is running but I want to be sure the images are served by nginx and not by tomcat so I look at myproject_access.log but nothing is happening.
ngnix is writing into the log ONLY when tomcat is NOT running.
Is there a way to "monitor" the static files served by nginx ?
Thank you
EDIT
Executing curl -I http://localhost:8081
when tomcat is running the output is:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1 //TOMCAT
...
when tomcat is NOT running the output is:
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Server: nginx/1.4.1 //NGINX
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 09:30:00 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 192
Connection: keep-alive

Answer 1

Your problem is that your are making the both servers listen on the same port, you need to move tomcat to another port like 8082 and let nginx listen to the main port ( which is 8081 in your case ), and then tell nginx to proxy to 8082 when the request isn't an image ( or any asset ).
also here's a refinement to your server block
server {
server_name localhost;
listen 8081;
root /Users/lorenzo/grails/projects;
location #tomcat {
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_pass http://localhost:8082;
}
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root html;
}
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ #tomcat;
}
}