How do I configure nginx rewrite rules to get CakePHP working on CentOS?

Question

Hi somebody please help me out, I’m trying to setup a cakephp environment on a Centos server running Nginx with Fact CGI. I already have a wordpress site running on the server a

Answer 1

It is not advisable to use 'IF' blocks inside a 'location' block.

Here is a more natural way to achieve the same, using regex locations.

In this example, CakePHP 2.x is the root app on a vhost (skipping common stuff like server_name , logs etc):

 root   /path/to/cakephp-2.x_root/app/webroot;
 index index.php;

 location ~ .+\.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404; #handle requests for missing .php files
        include        fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:7001; #the FPM pool port
    }


    location ~ ^/(.*) {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?url=$1&$args;
    }

Note that the .php location block is BEFORE the / location block. That's important because with regex locations, they are searched until the first match.

If you need to make it run in a sublocation, eg http://www.example.com/something/, here is how I managed to do it. First I had to do a symlink to trick nginx: extract cakephp-2.x somewhere, then in 'app/webroot' create a symlink to itself with the same name as the sublocation, e.g. 'ln -s ../webroot something' .

Then the following config works to access cackephp under /something/:

    location ~ ^/something/.+\.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404; #handle requests for missing .php files
        root /path/to/cakephp-2.x_root/app/webroot;
        include        fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:7001; #the FPM pool port
    }

    location ~ ^/something(?:/)(.*) {
        root /path/to/cakephp-2.x_root/app/webroot;
        index index.php;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /something/index.php?url=$1&$args;
    }

Symlinking can probably be avoided by using 'alias' istead of 'root' but I could not figure out how.