nginx redirect loop, remove index.php from url

Question

I want any requests like http://example.com/whatever/index.php, to do a 301 redirect to http://example.com/whatever/.

I tried adding:

Answer 1

Try

location = /whatever/index.php {
    return 301 $scheme://www.example.com/whatever/;
}

Another benefit from doing it this way is that nginx does a return faster than a rewrite.