Hello folks,

Maybe this will save some time to someone.

I have a setup where I serve a web application as follows:

* server A with nginx handles directly as much static content as possible
* only requests for URLs requesting dynamic processing go to server B hosting the application server

This improves performance and keeps the presentational content online if the application server fails.

nginx' try_files takes you 95% there: just put on A a filesystem hierarchy containing the static contents.
The missing 5% is how to serve pages containing forms posting to themselves. This means, the same
URL gets served statically upon GETs or HEADs, and dynamically otherwise.

Here's the gist of a working setup for this (sorry if the forum messes up formatting):

server {
root /var/www/www.foobar.com/; # put files for static content here

location / {
error_page 405 = @appsrv;
# remove if() and @appsrv will get as $uri the last try of try_files
if ($request_method != GET) { return 405; }
try_files $uri $uri/ $uri/index.html @appsrv;
}

# pass everything to FastCGI
location @appsrv { fastcgi_pass 173.244.206.26:9003; }
}

cheers
michele