Serve Rails API and Ionic mobile website together

Question

Basing on How to run Ionic serve permanently? and Deploy Ionic as a website, nginx should be able to serve the code from the Ionic\'s www folder. I am exploiting the idea of

Answer 1

Take #1: Come up with a Nginx config that returns Ionic files when Rails signals it in a hidden manner. May be clumsy, so please feel free to offer criticism, pitfalls, or improvements.

Nginx config:

server {
  # Development logging
  access_log /home/builder/projects/web/log/access.log;
  error_log /home/builder/projects/web/log/error.log notice;

  listen  80;
  server_name projects.host www.projects.host;

  # Eusure Rails' index route gets uri "/" first.
  index index.html;

  # All API json calls and requests to Rails controllers.
  location ~ ^\/(.+\.json$|others.*|users.*|index\.html$) {

    # Rails server
    proxy_pass  http://127.0.0.1:3000;

    # The Rails server may request Ionic mobile website with a temporary redirect (status 307)
    proxy_intercept_errors on;
    error_page 307 = @temp_redirect;
  }

  # If a temporary redirect is to /mobile_web, response with Ionic mobile root.
  location @temp_redirect {
    if ($upstream_http_location ~ ^http.+\/\/.+\/mobile_web$) {
      set $mobile true;
      root /home/builder/projects/mobile/www;
    }
    # Something else, return it.
    if ($mobile != true) {
      return 307 $upstream_http_location;
    }
  }

  # Ionic mobile root
  location / {
    root        /home/builder/projects/mobile/www;
  }
}

In RoR:

  # Decide whether to handle the root action within Rails app or to
  # signal the downstream server (nginx) to return Ionic mobile web.
  def index
    # TODO: Needs a bit of logic before the following redirect.
    redirect_to '/mobile_web', status: :temporary_redirect  # 307
  end

Two birds with one APP :).