Baking CakePHP with nginx

I've switched all my web server related infrastructure to nginx which is a high performance HTTP server (amongst other things) which blows apache out of the water (IMNSHO).

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;
    }
  }
}