ouch sorry all good - I had a special location = /robots.txt block which was causing the try_files directive not to be called. removing that (or testing with a different filename) worked :)
Posted at Nginx Forum: https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,272503,272510#msg-272510 _______________________________________________ nginx mailing list nginx@nginx.org http://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx
