Example Nginx configuration for serving pre-rendered HTML from Javascript pages/apps using the Prerender Service (https://github.com/collectiveip/prerender).Instead of using try_files (which can cause unnecessary overhead on busy servers), you could check $uri for specific file extensions and set $prerender appropriately.

nginx.conf

# Note (November 2016):
# This config is rather outdated and left here for historical reasons, please refer to prerender.io for the latest setup information
# Serving static html to Googlebot is now considered bad practice as you should be using the escaped fragment crawling protocol

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name yourserver.com;

    root /path/to/your/htdocs;

    error_page 404 /404.html
    index index.html;

    location ~ /\. {
        deny all;
    }

    location / {
        try_files $uri @prerender;
    }

    location @prerender {
        #proxy_set_header X-Prerender-Token YOUR_TOKEN;

        set $prerender 0;
        if ($http_user_agent ~* "googlebot|yahoo|bingbot|baiduspider|yandex|yeti|yodaobot|gigabot|ia_archiver|facebookexternalhit|twitterbot|developers\.google\.com") {
            set $prerender 1;
        }
        if ($args ~ "_escaped_fragment_|prerender=1") {
            set $prerender 1;
        }
        if ($http_user_agent ~ "Prerender") {
            set $prerender 0;
        }

        if ($prerender = 1) {
            rewrite .* /$scheme://$host$request_uri? break;
            #proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
            proxy_pass http://service.prerender.io;
        }
        if ($prerender = 0) {
            rewrite .* /index.html break;
        }
    }
}

Is there a way to avoid using prerender.io at all?
Let's say I have generated static files with rendertron, I want to store them in a sub-folder
How can i ask nginx "if is googlebot|otherbot", please load files from this directory?
Why would I need a rendertron server running all the time, or why would I need prerender.io, if the end result is kinda the same as with static files...?