Question How does location and proxy_pass work?

[MartinH]

Hi,

for basic testing I have set up a simple node server listening on port 5100 and a nginx directive

location /api/ {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5100/api/;
}

I am pretty new at this, but doesn't this directive mean, that a request like

https://myserver.com/api/xxxx

will be redirected to

http://127.0.0.1:5100/api/xxxx

I get an empty 200 response (was expecting a simple string).

A request to

location /api/ {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:5100/;
}

is working fine, but is not routed to /api/xxxx like I want it to.

What am I doing wrong? Thanks