Clean URL's in Nginx

Published: November 07, 2010

Quick post to let everyone know of a good trick I just figured out. Most clean URL's are created through a rewrite and query page that does all the work. Sometimes though you just want to have a couple php scripts that you can link to like http://oldstatic.travisberry.com/example

In Apache this is trivial. In Nginx, you can spend a couple days trying to get right.

Turns out the solution is simple. If you use a block of code like this

## Parse all .php file in the /var/www directory
location ~ .php$


   location ~ \.php$ {
   fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING     $query_string;
    fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD   $request_method;
    fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE     $content_type;
    fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH   $content_length;
    fastcgi_intercept_errors        on;
    fastcgi_ignore_client_abort     off;
    fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;
    fastcgi_send_timeout 180;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 180;
    fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
    fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;
    fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
    fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
}</code></pre></noscript>


to turn on PHP, just replace the location with




location ~ $


and comment out




##fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(.*)$;


Your code block should now look like




Now instead of linking to /example.php, you can save the file with no extension, put it on your server, and link to /example

Nginx will now handle files without and extension as PHP files. This is a solution that will only fit a limited number of use cases, but compared to writing a rewrite wrapper, this is quick and easy.