Nginx with multiple locations serving some php files as download

Question

I have two directories, /home/php/www/public/ and /home/php/www/private/ and I would like to serve which one depending on the first part of the uri.

I would like /foo/ to act 'normally' in that it should serve which ever file is in the location, for example mysite.com/about would serve /public/about.php. However /private/ would always serve a single file no matter the request, for example mysite.com/private/foo, mysite.com/private/bar and mysite.com/private/foo/test would all serve /private/app.php.

I am probably in the 100s of different variations from what I have seen here and in other googles but being very new to all of this can't seem to piece together exactly what I need. After a few days of trial and error I am close to what I am after, mysite.com/about serves /public/about.php correctly and mysite.com/private/whatever gets /private/app.php but it doesn't execute it, it serves it as a download instead.

Here is what I have so far:

server {                                                                                 

        listen 80;                                                                       
        listen [::]:80;                                                                  

        root /home/php/www/public;                                                       

        index index.php;                                                                 

        server_name mysite.com;                                        

        location /private/ {                                                                
                alias /home/php/www/private;                                                 
                try_files /app.php =404;                                              

                location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {                                              
#               location ~ \.php$ {                                                      
#                       fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;                        
                        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;                               
                        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;                      

#                       fastcgi_index app.php;                                        
#                       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
#                       include fastcgi_params;                                          

#                       return 302 https://google.com;                                   
                }                                                                        
        }                                                                                

        location / {                                                                     
                try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ @extensionless-php;                       
        }                                                                                

        location ~ \.php$ {                                                              
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;                                       
                fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
        }

        location @extensionless-php {
                rewrite ^(.*)$ $1.php last;
        }

        location ~ /\.ht {
                deny all;
        }
}

If I replace everything inside the location /private/ block with just return 302 https://google.com it redirects successfully to google.com, so I know this location block is being returned but putting the same thing inside the location ~ \.php$ inside location /private/ nothing happens so to me it looks like it is not hitting this block, what am I missing? There aren't any errors in /var/log/nginx/error.log relating to this.

Richard Smith Richard Smith · Accepted Answer · 2020-05-06T15:03:27

Try:

location /private/ {                                                                
    root /home/php/www/private;
    try_files /app.php =404;

    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
}

Use root rather than alias as you are not trying to alias the original request. The file was downloaded because of the unnecessary nested location block.

Nginx with multiple locations serving some php files as download

1 Answers