How to remove language part of $uri for purpose of try_files in nginx 1.6?

Question

I have a site with language prefixes in $uri, for example:

• http://www.example.com/en/some/content
• http://www.example.com/ru/novost

Sadly, due to limitations of framework I'm using, files are also linked / looked for under prefixed addresses:

• http://www.example.com/files/image.png (this is valid and expected)
• http://www.example.com/en/files/image.png
• http://www.example.com/ru/files/image.png

What I want my nginx to do is to try files in following order:

1. $uri as is
2. /files/image.png (even if en or ru or any other two-letter code was present)
3. /index.php to get file generated if applicable

1. and 3. can be (are) done with simple:

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

I know about ~* command to tell Nginx to do a regex match (source). Sadly, I have no idea how to formulate match to omit potential group instead of selecting it. And trying with variables before and after made me try to use if - of course I want to avoid that.

I believe I'm missing something relatively simple.

Answer 1

Assuming the language part is a two lowercase characters string, this is possible to achieve this with :

location ~ "^(?:/[a-z]{2})?/(.*)$" {
    try_files /$1 /index.php;
}