Is it possible to "add" a second folder to the current folder file contents? symlink?

Question

question: Is it possible to "add" the contents of a 2nd folder to the current folder file contents? (In essence I was asking from a full Unix is perspective but may be nginx would work too as the goal is for a web server)

Example:

I have /pub where our server software lives. It has index.php But I also have /static/files where test.php lives. I do not want to place test.php in /pub. What I want is that if I visit the nginx webserver with root /pub that it sees both test.php and index.php in the root.

Why?

Because nowadays I have add a lot of validation files to our server that need to exist in the root. Files like bing_dfsfsfsdfs.html and google_aaddasdjsad.html. It is a multiserver setup so the files have amounted to quite a few. I was thinking of creating a folder /static/files where I can store all these single files ... and keep the /pub folder clean with the software only.

Answer 1

Purely from an nginx perspective, this seems like a job for try_files. With try_files, you can tell nginx to try multiple locations for a given URI. So something like:

location ~ ^/([^/]+)$ {
  try_files $uri /static/files/$1 =404;
}

I'm not sure of the exact syntax to be used, but the point is to tell nginx to try the default root first for the file, then try in static/files directory in the root and finally return a 404 if nothing worked.

Answer 2

you can use alias

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#alias

Defines a replacement for the specified location.

location ~ ^/(.+\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png))$ {
    alias /static/files/$1;
}