Rewriting nginx for pushState-URL's

Question

I am trying to get nginx to work with my pushState-based URI handling that backbone.js manages for me in an Javascript app.

Right now accessing URI's with one level, eg. example.com/users works well, but not two-level or deeper URI's, such as example.com/users/all, which is mentioned in the Backbone documentation:

For example, if you have a route of /documents/100, your web server must be able to serve that page, if the browser visits that URL directly

So, being far from acquainted with nginx's rewrite options, I am still sure that I can do something like rewrite ^ /index.html; to redirect everything to my index.html, but loosing out on any eventual static files (images, javascript & css) stored on the same server which I need to be able to access.

So what should I do instead with the below shown, current configuration, to make this work?

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name  example.com;

    location / {
        root   /var/www/example.com;
        try_files $uri /index.html;
    }

}

Answer 1

I ended up going with this solution:

server {

    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    root /var/www/example.com;

    # Any route containing a file extension (e.g. /devicesfile.js)
    location ~ ^.+\..+$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
    }

    # Any route that doesn't have a file extension (e.g. /devices)
    location / {
        try_files $uri /index.html;
    }

}

This way, at least I still get proper 404 errors if a file isn't found.