Should I have these directives in my Nginx config? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm using just Rails straight with Nginx (no apache), and wondering if I even need the following in my virtual hosts:
# serve static content directly
location ~* \.(ico|jpg|gif|png|css|js|swf|html)$ {
if (-f $request_filename) {
expires max;
break;
}
}
Is it even relevant if I'm not using Apache?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Since you are using Rails, probably the only config you need is just:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
location / {
root path/to/static/files;
try_files $uri #rails;
expires max;
}
location #rails {
# proxy_pass to gunicorn or whatever...
}
}
But it is always better to keep all media files in a separate directory:
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.org;
location / {
# proxy_pass to gunicorn or whatever...
}
location /media/ {
root path/to/static/files;
try_files $uri #rails;
expires max;
}
}
Leave ugly and complicated rules like:
location ~* \.(ico|jpg|gif|png|css|js|swf|html)$`
to PHP-folks. They usually have a mess of code and media in their projects and like programming in web-server configs instead of doing all the application logic in application.

Answer 2

This if is meaningless and just wasting of your cpu.
From documentation:
Enables or disables adding or modifying the “Expires” and “Cache-Control” response header fields provided that the response code equals 200, 201, 204, 206, 301, 302, 303, 304, or 307.
# http://nginx.org/r/expires
Do you see 404 here? I do not.
Stops processing the current set of ngx_http_rewrite_module directives.
# http://nginx.org/r/break
And I see no other rewrite directives in your location.

Answer 3

This directive tells nginx to set the expires header to largest possible value and to stop processing further directives when requested file ends with one of those extensions and exists. Those files will be served by nginx. This is valid directive whether you use apache or not. You don't have to use it, but you better do because nginx is very good at serving static files.
Update
As other people pointed out, you should avoid using if. You can do this by:
location ~* \.(ico|jpg|gif|png|css|js|swf|html)$ {
try_files $uri =404;
expires max;
}
if you want to do special processing, use named locations:
location ~* \.(ico|jpg|gif|png|css|js|swf|html)$ {
try_files $uri #process_404;
expires max;
}
location #process_404{
# do your stuff
}