Rewrite all requests to index.php with nginx

Question

In my apache configuration I have the following simple rewrite rule which

1. unless file exists will rewrite to index.php
2. on the urls you never see the f

Answer 1

If you want to pass just the index.php ( no other php file will be passed to fastcgi ) to fastcgi in case you have routes like this in a framework like codeigniter

$route["/download.php"] = "controller/method";


location ~ index\.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        include fastcgi.conf;
}

Answer 2

1 unless file exists will rewrite to index.php

Add the following to your location ~ \.php$

try_files = $uri @missing;

this will first try to serve the file and if it's not found it will move to the @missing part. so also add the following to your config (outside the location block), this will redirect to your index page

location @missing {
    rewrite ^ $scheme://$host/index.php permanent;
}

---

2 on the urls you never see the file extension (.php)

to remove the php extension read the following: http://www.nullis.net/weblog/2011/05/nginx-rewrite-remove-file-extension/

and the example configuration from the link:

location / {
    set $page_to_view "/index.php";
    try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrites;
    root   /var/www/site;
    index  index.php index.html index.htm;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/site$page_to_view;
}

# rewrites
location @rewrites {
    if ($uri ~* ^/([a-z]+)$) {
        set $page_to_view "/$1.php";
        rewrite ^/([a-z]+)$ /$1.php last;
    }
}