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I have a express web server with static files. Let's call this my express-deployment.

I'd like to use my ingress-nginx to serve static files from my express-deployment without ever actually hitting my express server.

In nginx this is done with the location directive where you point to files locally hosted. While I see an option for locations-snippet in the ingress-nginx configMap, I'm not entirely sure how I would have this point to files in another container.

Is this possible with ingress-nginx? If so how would I go about it? Alternatively, is this something that requires an nginx container to be hosted along side my express server? (Seems odd that I would need 2 nginx for that)

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2 Answers 2

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In theory, you could have a PV in in RWX mode mounted to both express and ingress and provide custom config to the nginx-ingress pods, but that should be avoided. Ingress Controller has one responsibility - implement Ingress rules defined in your cluster. To serve static content you should have a pod that does that, which indeed means ie. running second nginx in your stack. The thing is, that you should treat your ingress controller as part of the infrastructure providing generic cluster functionality, and serving static files from some place (or container if they are versioned/built as docker images) is de facto part of your application.

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4 Comments

Ok makes sense. Just a follow up question, should I be using an emptyDir volume to share static files across containers for this use case?
the real question is, how do you provide the files you want to "share". emptyDir is exactly what it says it is, so it will be empty and you will need to populate it with content you want to use. It's not pretty, but possible to achieve with init container that will copy some assets into shared folder from the container image if you need that, but maybe you should consider splitting build into two containers where one would be the nginx with static content baked into the image
my docker image for express in production runs a deploy script that copys static files to /dist/ (simple Copy command in docker). If I use emptyDir but use the same folder that Docker has copied files to, would it be empty?
I'm not convinced by the "single purpose" principle in this case. Removing static traffic from the app is a proven deployment pattern. NGINX is much better at caching and serving static content than any middle tier technology Node, Java, Python, etc. Serving the (possibly cached) static content directly should be lower or equivalent work for the NGINX pods than the network I/O to the back end pods. Lower latency and a bit less work for the Kubernetes network infrastructure (1 less hop). Does anyone have experience to back up the "single purpose" principle in this case?
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If it's a django app take a look at whitenoise http://whitenoise.evans.io/en/stable/ to provide a solution here.

This is a straightforward recommendation, but I spent much time searching around before I found it referenced.

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It says that OP wants to serve these files from Nginx, not from app. Also, it's an Express app, not a Django app.

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