Question

I managed to get this to work a while back, but on returning to the cakephp project I had started it seems that whatever changes I’ve made to nginx recently (or perhaps a recent update) have broken my rewrite rules.

Currently I have:

worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.php index.html index.htm;
        }

        location /basic_cake/ {
            index  index.php;

            if (-f $request_filename) {
              break;
            }
            if (!-f $request_filename) {
              rewrite ^/basic_cake/(.+)$ /basic_cake/index.php?url=$1 last;
              break;
            }
        }

        location /cake_test/ {
            index  index.php;

            if (-f $request_filename) {
              break;
            }
            if (!-f $request_filename) {
              rewrite ^/cake_test/(.+)$ /cake_test/index.php?url=$1 last;
              break;
            }
        }

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }

        # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
        #
        location ~ \.php$ {
            root           html;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    }

    server {
        listen       8081;
        server_name  localhost;

        root /srv/http/html/xsp;

        location / {
            index  index.html index.htm index.aspx default.aspx;
        }

        location ~ \.(aspx|asmx|ashx|asax|ascx|soap|rem|axd|cs|config|dll)$ {
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9001;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    }

}

The problem that I have is that the css and images will not load from the webroot. Instead if I visit http://localhost/basic_cake/css/cake.generic.css, I get a page which tells me:

CakePHP: the rapid development php
framework Missing Controller

Error: CssController could not be
found.

Error: Create the class CssController
below in file:
app/controllers/css_controller.php

Notice: If you want to customize this
error message, create
app/views/errors/missing_controller.ctp
CakePHP: the rapid development php
framework

Does anybody have any ideas on how to fix this?

(I posted this on ServerFault, but I have this feeling that not many people check that site in comparison to this one, so I probably shouldn’t have bothered…)

Answer 1

I’ve managed to solve this by adding App.base parameter to the cakephp configuration instead of using the App.baseUrl (looked the code in dispatcher.php).

So let’s say I have the cakephp copy located in /var/www/html/cakeprj and my WWWROOT is /var/www/html:

1. nginx host configuration

   # that's for all other content on the web host
   location / {
       root        /var/www/html;
       autoindex   off;
       index       index.php index.html index.htm;
   
       ...
   }
   
   # that's for cakephp
   location /cakeprj {
       rewrite     ^/cakeprj$ /cakeprj/ permanent;
       rewrite     ^/cakeprj/(.+)$ /$1 break;
       root        /var/www/html/cakeprj/app/webroot;
       try_files   $uri /$uri/ @cakephp;
   }
   
   # that's for all other php scripts on the web host
   location ~ \.php$ {
       root                                /var/www/html;
       fastcgi_pass                        unix:/var/lib/fcgi/php-fcgi.socket;
       ...
       include                             /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
   }
   
   
   # that's for cakephp execution
   location @cakephp {
       set $q $request_uri;
       if ($request_uri ~ "^/cakeprj(.+)$") {
           set $q $1;
       }
       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME       /var/www/html/cakeprj/app/webroot/index.php;
       fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING          url=$q;
       fastcgi_pass                        unix:/var/lib/fcgi/php-fcgi.socket;
       include                             /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
   }
   

2. cakephp configuration in app/config/core.php

   Configure::write('App.base', '/cakeprj');
   Configure::write('App.baseUrl', '/cakeprj/'); // seems like it doesn't matter anymore
   

…and voila – you get nginx serving cakephp static files correctly, url passing to the cakephp dispatcher correctly and cakephp generating urls correctly as well.

P.S. if your nginx doesn’t support try_files I believe its configuration can be rewritten with if condition and another rewrite.