Nginx + PHP-FPM：在别名位置提供 php 个文件

Question

I just started to work with nginx, before I always used apache2 when hosting any kind of website or application and it was pretty easy to deploy it. My goal was to deploy nextcloud, but not as maybe usual in the root of a server. As I just rented a VPS and got a generic subdomain without any control of subdomains or DNS entries in general.

I didn't modify my nginx.conf, but added a new file with a server directive like the following:

server {
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;

        server_name example.com;
        root /srv/www/html;

        include snippets/nextcloud-phpfpm.conf;

        location /cloud {
                alias /srv/www/nextcloud;

                include snippets/nextcloud-phpfpm.conf;
                #location ~* (.+\.php)$ {
                        #fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php8.1-fpm-nextcloud.sock;
                        ...
                #}
        }

        #try_files $uri /index.html;
}

The included nextcloud-phpfpm.conf:

location ~* \.php/*$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php8.1-fpm-homecloud.sock;
        #include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename;
}

The problem is, that php-fpm just responded with "File not found", without any further hints or information, so debugging was pretty hard.

Of course, I used google, stackoverflow in the first place to find a solution to my problem. The most often advised solution was to correctly set the SCRIPT_FILENAME parameter for fastcgi with something like $document_root$fastcgi_script_name . After some time a found out, that is - at least in my case - crap and doesn't work, in fact it just produces a much more faulty file path than before.

Answer 1

It was quite a tough way to get to a solution that I found on my own, and I want to share it for everyone.

Nearly all solutions that I found suggested something like

fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

to properly set the PHP parameter so that PHP-FPM can properly find the file. But that didn't just work.

After some depressing time of debugging and trying things out, I found out that - although $document_root provided the correct path of /srv/www/nextcloud - $fastcgi_script_name did not provide what I expected. I expected, that it is info.php when I call it with <url>/cloud/info.php , but in fact it return everything after the actual domain like cloud/info.php . That, in the end, leads again to an incorrect SCRIPT_FILENAME ;

There are now two solutions for this special problem

Solution 1

I found out, that the $fastcgi_script_name can be modified based on the URI path. As mentioned in the nginx docs , the fastcgi_split_path_info directive can be used to specify a regex with two capture groups, the first is then stored in $fastcgi_script_name and the second in $fastcgi_path_info .

The approach is then to change the first capturing group in such way, that the /cloud is not included anymore.

before (as suggested in Nextcloud docs for nginx):

fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?\.php)(\/.*|)$;

after:

fastcgi_split_path_info ^/cloud(/.+?\.php)(\/.*|)$;

I expect this to work also for most cases, as only a part at the beginning is removed the the remaining path is kept.

Solution 2

I also found another variable of nginx which may be suitable in some cases, but is expected to fail with something like index.php/apps etc.

fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $request_filename

This parameter contains the full real path to the script on the filesystem - at least in my case - and may also be used in combination with regex the make some modifications.

Further thoughts

Nevertheless it my first-time experience with nginx is quite negative. I wanted to get into nginx without any knowledge, and in my opinion the configuration syntax is much easier than apache2. But the devil seems to be in the details, making it quite a nightmare to the configure some easy stuff and, in particular, debug issues. Debugging output that can be activated with some configuration options in nginx and php-fpm just do not produce some useful output the debug such an issue, and when trying nginx for the first time, recompiling nginx (as suggested somewhere) just takes my motivation.

Are there any comments on this? Maybe other solutions or hints for further usage? At the moment, I just tried a basic setup like described in the question and may not cover any other quirks.