Often I manage websites that use bower as package manager and I don’t want to grant the access to all the packages installed, so I have to filter the file served by nginx. You can see the regex of the service in the next snippet of code:

server {
    listen  80  ssl;
    server_name localhost;

    location ~* ^/mywebsite/(.*)\.(html|htm|js|css|png|jpe?g|ico|gif|eot|ttf|woff)(.*)$ {
        alias /path/to/my/static/www/;
        
        try_files $1.$2$3 =404;
    }
}

So the website http://mydomain.domain/mywebsite/ is the base URL, what remains of the string is divided in three parts: file name, extension, query.

File name is a string composed by any characters: http://mydomain.domain/mywebsite/filename. After this you have to find a point and a valid extension: http://mydomain.domain/mywebsite/filename.html. In the end you can find also some query string: http://mydomain.domain/mywebsite/filename.html?param1=test.

As you can see in the last URL example (http://mydomain.domain/mywebsite/filename.html?param1=test) the three parts are:

1. filename
2. html
3. ?param1=test

At this point I try to serve the file composed with these three components try_files $1.$2$3 otherwise I will return a not found error =404. The files will be searched in the path indicated in alias, that correspond to the main folder of the website.

The third component is useful for some URL that require some file with a parameter, like bootstrap fonts.

If you need some help to start with nginx take a look to this tutorial.