redirect all /api/.. requests to express - reactjs

Question

I currently have a nginx server running with a react app as frontend and a express server as backend.
The express server is running at localhost:5000/
server {
listen 80 ;
server_name siteurl;
server_name siteip;
# SSL configuration
#
# listen 443 ssl default_server;
# listen [::]:443 ssl default_server;
#
# Note: You should disable gzip for SSL traffic.
# See: https://bugs.debian.org/773332
#
# Read up on ssl_ciphers to ensure a secure configuration.
# See: https://bugs.debian.org/765782
#
# Self signed certs generated by the ssl-cert package
# Don't use them in a production server!
#
# include snippets/snakeoil.conf; # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
location ^~ /api/ {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
proxy_pass http://localhost:5000/;
proxy_ssl_session_reuse off;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
proxy_redirect off;
}
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
root /usr/share/nginx/site/front;
try_files $uri /index.html =404;
}
I want all /api/* requests to redirect to my express server, currently when I do site/api/ it goes to my express server, however when doing /api/users it won't go to my express server and will go to my react server.
How would I be able to make this work
thx

Answer 1

When you use the ^~ modifier within the location directive, you actually tell nginx that the path following is a regular expression. If so, you have to format it as a regular expression:
location ^~ /api/.* {