I have a relatively straight forward config:

upstream appserver-1 {
    server unix:/var/www/example.com/app/tmp/gunicorn.sock fail_timeout=0;
}
server {
    listen  80;
    server_name  example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://appserver-1;
        proxy_redirect              off;
        proxy_set_header            Host $host;
        proxy_set_header            X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header            X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

        auth_basic                  "Restricted";
        auth_basic_user_file        /path/to/htpasswd;

    }

    location /api/ {
        auth_basic          off;
    }
}

The goal is to use basic auth on the whole website, except on the /api/ subtree. While it does work with respect to basic auth, other directives like proxy_pass are not in effect on /api/ as well.

Is it possible to just disable basic auth while retaining the other directives without copy&pasting everything?