I'm trying to set up a sort of shared hosting with nginx where each user has a public_html directory. Requests to /~username are aliased to /home/domain-users/username/public_html. Problem is, I also want autoindexing enabled. With the config below added into a server block, requests to specific files like /~username/test.txt work fine; they are aliased to /home/domain-users/username/public_html/test.txt. However, when trying to request /~username or ~/username/, I get a 404 and /var/log/nginx/error.log reveals that autoindex is for some reason attempting to list files in /home/domain-users/username/public_htm (note the missing "l": the path is truncated.)
Since being able to access /~username without a trailing slash as a directory is not vital, I tried removing $public_html_path/ from the try_files directive. Then, even when requesting /~username/, autoindex is not called. Perhaps a literal trailing slash is required in try_files for autoindex to function.
# For requests to "/~username" without a trailing slash set $public_html_path ""; # Lazy quantifier at the end allows processing requests to "~/username". We add the trailing slash later in try_files location ~ ^\/\~(?<user_home_folder>[^\\n\/]+)(?<public_html_path>\/.*)?$ { alias /home/domain-users/$user_home_folder/public_html; autoindex on; try_files $public_html_path $public_html_path/ =404; } My research has yielded scant results, the closest being this StackOverflow question. Since this appears to be a bug in NGINX that's unlikely to be fixed (the last comment was well over a year ago) I'm looking for a workaround. Using the root directive instead of alias would be perfect, except then autoindex removes the critical /~username/ part of the URI, thinking that the files it lists are in the web root since, in a way, they are. Even hacky workarounds will be very much appreciated... Thanks!
