Ahsan's questions

I have an app deployed in testing mode on a server. Access to it has been restricted to a select group of users via HTTP-Authentication. That works fine. The problem is that if I serve static files via different 'location' directive, nginx gives me a "Not Authorized" for those files. I tried auth_basic off, but no dice.

Here's the vhost conf:

# Virtual Host 

upstream appname {
  server 127.0.0.1:4000;
  server 127.0.0.1:4001;
  server 127.0.0.1:4002;
}

server { 
  listen 80;
  server_name appname.domain.com;

  # write app specific log
  # make sure you create this file in your log directory before running behind nginx
  access_log  /home/apps/appname/shared/log/nginx.log  main;

 # let nginx serve static files directly
  # images
  location ^~/images {
    auth_basic off;
    root /home/apps/appname/current/public/images;

  }

  location ^~/covers {
    auth_basic off;
    root /home/apps/covers;

  }

 # # javascript
 location ^~/javascripts {
    auth_basic off;
   root /home/apps/appname/current/public/javascripts;
 }

 # # css
  location ^~/stylesheets {
   auth_basic off;
    root /home/apps/appname/current/public/style;
 }           

  # Push all other requests to Merb
  location / {
    # needed to forward user's IP address to merb
    proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;

    auth_basic "domains";
    auth_basic_user_file htpasswd;

    if (!-f $request_filename) {
      proxy_pass http://appname;
      break;
    }
  }

}

Any suggestions ?

EDIT:

I tried putting images under another subdomain and configuring a separate 'server' block for it - without any http_auth. But it still gives me a 403 forbidden on the image! Here's what I added:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name images.domain.com;

  access_log  /home/apps/appname/shared/log/nginx_images.log  main;
  error_log  /home/apps/appname/shared/log/nginx_images_error.log;

  error_page 500 502 503 504  /500.html;
  location = /500.html {
    root  /home/apps/www/http_error_codes;
  }

 location /images {
   root /home/apps/appname/current/public/images;
 }

 location /covers {
   root /home/apps/covers;
 }

 open_file_cache max=1000 inactive=20s;
 open_file_cache_valid    30s;
 open_file_cache_min_uses 2;
 open_file_cache_errors   on;
}

I also tried to open a new browser and access an image file directly from images.domain.com, but it still says 403 forbidden!

I need to serve around 70,000 static files (jpg) using nginx. Should I dump them all in a single directory, or is there a better (efficient) way ? Since the filenames are numeric, I considered having a directory structure like:

xxx/xxxx/xxx

The OS is CentOS 5.1