Disable caching of a single file with try_files directive

I got the following setup working for my Angular apps, includes changes to index.html and nginx configuration:

index.html

<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="max-age=0" />
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Tue, 01 Jan 1980 1:00:00 GMT" />
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />

nginx.conf

location / {
  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}

location ~ \.html$ {
  add_header Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate";
  add_header Expires "Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT";
  add_header Pragma no-cache;
}

Works both when user navigates to "site.com" and "site.com/some/url" or "site.com/#/login". The "index.html" changes are to be on the safe side mainly.

Thanks for a great answer Rem! As He Shiming points out with the accepted solution the caching headers don't get added when visiting the root e.g. www.example.com/, but do get added when visiting any deep link, e.g. www.example.com/some/path.

After a lot of digging I believe this is because of the default behaviour of the ngnix module ngx_http_index_module, it includes index.html by default so when visiting the root /, the first location block's rules are satisfied, and index.html gets served without the cache control headers. The workaround I used was to include an index directive without specifying index.html in the first location block, forcing the root / to be served from the second location block.

I also had another problem, I included a root directive in the first location block which broke deep links and is also a bad idea. I moved the root directive to the server level.

Hope this helps, this is my solution...

server {
  listen       80;
  server_name  localhost;
  root   /usr/share/nginx/html;

  location / {
    add_header X-debug-whats-going-on 1;
    index do-not-use-me.html;
    try_files $uri @index;                 
  }

  location @index {
    add_header X-debug-whats-going-on 2;
    add_header Cache-Control no-cache;
    expires 0;
    try_files /index.html =404;
  }
}

I've included debug headers to help make it absolutely clear what location block is serving what content. It's also worth noting the unintuitive behaviour of the add_header directive, essential reading if you also intend to add headers to all requests outside of a location block.

location / {
  try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}

location = /index.html {
  expires -1;
}

Found a solution using nginx named locations:

location = / {
    add_header Cache-Control no-cache;
    expires 0;
    try_files /index.html =404;
}

location / {
    gzip_static on;
    try_files $uri @index;
}

location @index {
    add_header Cache-Control no-cache;
    expires 0;
    try_files /index.html =404;
}