NGINX - rewrite rules for PHP REST

Question

I am currently learning REST with NGINX (and PHP-FPM).

I have a couple of questions around routing (eg /customers).

First of all should I be using NGINX or PHP for routing (put them as rewrite rules like /customer/{cusID} would map to /customer.php?cusid={cusid}) or rewrite based on /customer/{cusID} mapping to /customer.php and then deal with if it has a cusID resource in the URI using PHP?

Second, is rewrite the best way of achieving this, I have seen that you can use alias in NGINX to do something similar?

Answer 1

In this case I would use a simple rewrite rule as follows:

rewrite ^customer/([0-9]+)$ /customer.php?cusid=$1 last

Your URL will be kept pretty-printed and you will be able to deal with the specified customer id within your PHP code.