Pithikos's questions

I am trying to set up my SPA to return 404 for invalid resources by having nginx do a backcheck for the resource before responding. All this is to avoid invalid pages coming with 200 and thus having spiders crawling soft 404 pages.

My desired behaviour

Browser                           Nginx                           API
  | -- GET myapp.com/users/12 -->   |                              |
  |                                 | -- GET myapi:8000/users/12   |
  |                                 |   <----------- 404 --------  |
  | <-- 404 index.html ------------ |
  |                                 |

I expect my configuration to be something like below

server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index  index.html;

        location /users/ {
          # 1. Fetch from myapi:8000
          # 2. Return index.html with status from fetched URI
        }
}

I've been digging around for a while now but I'm a bit lost on how to achieve this. I've seen many simple examples out there with try_files etc. but nothing that seems to fit my case, since it seems most examples do very simplistic forwarding.

How can I achieve the above behaviour?