How to create SEO url for Nginx - .htaccess

Question

I'm having issues converting the below htaccess rules to nginx. My site is written in PHP.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-/]+).html$ fullstory.php?url=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-/]+).html/$ fullstory.php?url=$1
What I'm trying to do is convert this URL http://example.com/blog/fullstory.php?url=african-vegetable-recipe.html to http://example.com/blog/african-vegetable-recipe.html
OR
Get "african-vegetable-recipe.html" from example.com/blog/african-vegetable-recipe.html and use as a query string.
Can nginx handle this?

Answer 1

Are you using php-fpm? If so then you do not need to spend time re-writing the url. In Nginx, you have control over what parameters get passed to PHP.
The following Nginx location block will pass all matching requests to fullstory.php, the original request will still appear in the $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] where you can parse it for any information you require without needing to change your Rewrite rules in future.
location ~* ^([a-zA-Z0-9-/]+).html$ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT /var/www/html/;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/html/fullstory.php;
fastcgi_pass php-fpm;
}
The exact path to fullstory.php obviously needs changing to match your own system.
Alternately. To pass the bracketed part of the regexp into PHP as part of the query string. Use this statement in your server {} block.
rewrite ^([a-zA-Z0-9-/]+).html /fullstory.php?url=$1;