How to serve images with nginx - configuration

Question

I am completely new to nginx and I am asked to find a way to serve Map Tiles that are separated according to the zoom levels. The image file structure is like ~/data/images/7/65/70.png where 7 is the zoom level, 65 and 70 are the lon-lat values. The folder 65 contains many files such as 71.png, 72.png and etc.
I have installed Nginx properly and I can get Welcome to nginx message. I have followed the instructions in http://nginx.org/en/docs/beginners_guide.html and created the /data/www and /data/images directories. I have placed index.html file under /data/www and tile images under /data/images. Then I modified the configuration file by adding following lines in http tags:
server {
location / {
root /data/www;
}
location /images/ {
root /data;
}
}
After reloading the config file and entering localhost on the browser I can neither get the index.html file nor see the images.
What I am trying to do is to display the image when I enter something as:
http://localhost/1.0.0/basemap/7/65/70.png
7: folder indicating 7th zoom level
65: folder indicating the latitude
70.png: file indicating the longitude (folder 65 includes many png files)
What am I missing?

Answer 1

Ok, let me explain something, you already have a localhost server, which is defined inside a file called default that is the file that causes the "Welcome to nginx" or something to appear, and I believe you can't create a new server with the same server_name, let's remove that and make your localhost serve only those images,
First we need to delete the default file from sites-enabled , it will still exist inside sites-available if you ever want to get it back. ( note that all files inside sites-enabled are simply symlinks from the files inside sites-available )
We create a new file inside sites-available and call it whatever you want, images-app for example
create the new server inside the images-app file, I'll assume that the root of the app is inside a folder called /data of course you will map that to your own server structure.
server {
server_name localhost;
root /data;
index index.html;
location / {
try_files $uri =404;
}
}
now we go to sites-enabled and enable this site we created inside sites-available
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/images-app /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
make sure that all the nginx config are correct
sudo nginx -t
If nothing is wrong we can go ahead and reload nginx settings
sudo service nginx reload

Answer 2

For my case I just edited /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default file.
I added following config:
location /images/ {
root /data;
}
and placed images under /data/images:
and url works: http://localhost/images/example.png
I use VS Code as SuperUser. (I know it is bad, but I accept risks)
It helps a lot with root access file editing:

Answer 3

I'm also new to nginx, Here is my solution that is similar with Mohammad AbuShady's answer :
delete sites-enabled/default
create the whatever.conf in /etc/nginx/conf.d/
The reason is:
sites-enabled/default has defined a server
that is listening on 80 rooting with /var/www/html
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
root /var/www/html;
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
}
the nginx.conf file includes other conf files
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
pay attention on permission
the 1st edition of my.conf is root on /home/scotv/, but will get 403 Forbidden error, check the error.log:
2016/04/07 20:12:44 [error] 12466#0: *2 open() "/home/scotv/data/a" failed (13: Permission denied),
client: 127.0.0.1, server: , request: "GET /a HTTP/1.1", host: "localhost"