Can nginx support URL based server blocks (VirtualHosts)?

Question

Note: “VirtualHost” is an Apache term. NGINX does not have Virtual hosts, it has “Server Blocks”. ( https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/server_blocks/ ).

I know about ip-based and name-based server blocks, but is it possible to have URL-based server blocks? In other words, I want http://example.com/foo and http://example.com/bar to be served from completely independent roots. This would be a trivial problem to solve with name-based server blocks if the names were different http://example1.com and http://example2.com , but since the names are the same ( example.com ) and only the path part of the URL is different... Can nginx support separate server blocks for these types of URL's?

Answer 1

See https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/request_processing.html

It seems the only options available are: IP address, port, host, and if none of those match, then it serves the default server. So, given that the name and port are the same in both cases, the only possible solution is to put a proxy server in front of nginx, and have the proxy server distribute to the backend nginx server using a different IP or port.