Nginx - block all *.php files except index

Question

I'm new to nginx. I need to block all .php files for security reasons. Any simple way to do it simmilar to Apache's .htaccess, as below:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.php$
RewriteRule !^index.php index.php [L,NC]

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Instead of usual nginx PHP handler location

location ~ \.php$ {
    ... # FastCGI PHP handler here
}

use something like

location ~ \.php$ {
    rewrite ^ /index.php last;
}
location = /index.php {
    ... # FastCGI PHP handler here
}

Although regex matching locations ( location ~ <regex> { ... } ) are taking priority over the prefix locations ( location <URI prefix> { ... } ) on the request URI match, exact matching location ( location = <URI> { ... } ) are taking priority over both of them.