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Accepted
Frank Vilea
Asked: 2011-08-24 07:03:53 +0800 CST

nginx rewrite rule to replace .php endings with /

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Basically, I want the ".php" to be replaced with a "/". I tried to just put my rule in the same location where the fastcgi is located.

location ~ \.php$ {
                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                include fastcgi_params;
                rewrite ^(.+)\.php$ /$1;
}

However, when I restart nginx with these settings, it gives me an 500 Internal Server Error and I can't even get the server to show me anything. Is this because of fast cgi? How can I work around this?

My system: nginx / php5-fpm / apc / php5-memcache / Ubuntu 10.10

php rewrite nginx

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Essentially, your general plan has a lot of problems with it. First, since you are removing the .php, the rewrite has to be outside of location ~ .php$ since the URL won't end in .php until after it is rewritten. Second, your rewrite is backwards. You want the URL http://www.example.com/foo/ to run foo.php, so the rewrite would need to be

    rewrite ^(.+)/ $1.php;

    But this means that EVERY directory on your website would need a matching .php file since you will no longer be able to use index.php automatically. Also, if nginx does not de-duplicate slashes before rewriting, if someone mistypes an address as http://www.example.com/foo// then it will execute /foo/.php.

    Finally, how many PHP files are you planning on creating? Do you really think serverfault has a 304162.php file for this question? (not that serverfaults' URL would match your rewrite since it doesn't end in /, nor do they use PHP I think)

    Normally, clean URLs work by declaring a specific location (for instance /questions/) then rewriting everything AFTER that URL to be run by a single script:

    rewrite ^/questions/(.*)$ /questions.php?path=$1 last;

    You could also do something like

    rewrite ^/questions/([0-9]+)(/.*)?$ /questions.php?qid=$1&extra=$2 last;

    So that URLs could be example.com/questions/1 example.com/questions/1/ example.com/questions/1/how-do-I-rewrite but example.com/questions/banana would be rejected for not having a numeric question id.

    Take a look at how people set up clean URLs for Drupal or Wordpress. Essentially, every request for a file that does not exist is rewritten as /index.php?q=$1, where index.php looks at the "q" variable to figure out what it is supposed to do.

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