NGINX Reverse Proxy to Kestrel/ .NET Core application returns 404

Question

I've been trying to host a .NET Core 2.2 application on a Digital Ocean Ubuntu Server using NGINX as a reverse proxy to Kestrel following the Microsoft guide.

Everything seems to work okay, there's no errors in my default-server file, which looks like this

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

    root /var/www/html;

    index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

    server_name _;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;

        proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection keep-alive;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $scheme;
    }
}

# Virtual Host configuration for example.com
server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    # these were here by default
    root /var/www/example.com;
    index index.html


    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection keep-alive;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $scheme;
    }
}

I run my application on localhost:5000 using dotnet [MyApplication].dll at this point there are still no errors but going to PostMan and trying to hit an API via http://<my-server-ip>:80/api/users/new-user returns a 404:

404 Not Found

404 Not Found

---

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)

What am I doing wrong? I'm new to server configuration so please be gentle!!!

Answer 1

Turns out the problem was inside location / on the try_files $uri $uri/ =404; which starts looking for files. The problem is that this is a Web API which serves JSON so there was never any content to be found to begin with. Deleting this and the virtual host configuration got everything working.