If you're a CakePHP user you'll know that it has some special rewriting requirements which can be found in $ROOT/.htaccess:
$ cat .htaccess
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
Unfortunately this .htaccess file is an apache mechanism to achieve the URL rewriting that is required to get CakePHP to play nice. The apache rewrite rules do not translate directly to something nginx can use though so some work is required to get things going.
Being lazy (and believing that no problem I discover is unique to me) I had a look a round and found this article by Chris Hartjes which needed a some mods for it to work for my setup:
# CakePHP rewrite rules
location / {
root /opt/local/html/live_site;
index index.php;
# Serve static page immediately
if (-f $request_filename) {
break;
}
if (!-f $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?url=$1 last;
break;
}
}
Here's my complete nginx.conf to give you an idea of how everything fits together:
user nobody;
worker_processes 1;
#error_log logs/error.log;
#error_log logs/error.log notice;
#error_log logs/error.log info;
#pid logs/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
server_names_hash_bucket_size 128;
sendfile on;
keepalive_timeout 20;
tcp_nodelay on;
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
rewrite_log on;
#error_page 404 /404.html;
# redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
#
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root share/nginx/html;
}
# Serve static content directly with some caching goodness
location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico)$ {
root /opt/local/html/live_site/app/webroot;
access_log off;
expires 1d;
}
# CakePHP rewrite rules
location / {
root /opt/local/html/live_site;
index index.php;
# Serve static pages immediately
if (-f $request_filename) {
break;
}
# Rewrite all other URLs
if (!-f $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?url=$1 last;
break;
}
}
# Pass PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
root /opt/local/html/live_site;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include /opt/local/etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
}
}
}
