nginx proxy_pass to root without path

Question

In the nginx proxy_pass documentation it says

If proxy_pass is specified without a URI, the request URI is passed to the server in the same form as sent by a client when the original request is processed, or the full normalized request URI is passed when processing the changed URI

(emphasis mine)

What if I want to proxy /foo to http://localhost:8080 without trailing foo. How do I do that?

Answer 1

You can specify http://localhost:8080/ with the trailing slash, denoting / as the URI. You cannot do this in named locations (AFAIK, nginx will throw error).