NGINX - Rewrite fancy url - apache

Question

I thought rewrite in Nginx would be straight-forward. It looks like its not.
I would like some help from you guys. My previous setup was Apache2 + PHP. My new setup is Nginx + PHP-FPM.
I would like to transform a simple virtualhost from Apache2.
The directory structure is:
/api (this is root)
VERSION (1)
--- api.php
--- .htaccess
Fx. domain.tld/1/
The .htaccess files looks like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)/api.json$ api.php?app=$1&sapp=$2 [L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^([a-z]+)/api.json$ api.php?app=$1 [L,QSA]
My new Nginx server file looks like this:
server {
listen 80;
root /var/www/domain.tld/api;
index index.php index.html;
server_name domain.tld;
location /1/ {
rewrite ^/([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)/api\.json$ /api.php?app=$1&sapp=$2;
rewrite ^/([a-z]+)/api\.json$ /api.php?app=$1;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include php5;
}
}
But it does not works when I try to view: domain.tld/1/view/api.json or domain.tld/1/view/extended/api.json
Can anyone explain and give some examples to fix this?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Take a look at how NGiNX processes location blocks, here: http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/request_processing.html
As you can see in your case the request is only served by your location /1/ block, as that is the only one of the two that matches. Problem is, NGiNX only uses one location block per request, so once it got into the location /1/ block, it will not go to the other location block later.
The solution here is to also include your php5 file in the location /1/ block at the end.
location /1/ {
rewrite ^/([a-z]+)/([a-z]+)/api\.json$ /api.php?app=$1&sapp=$2;
rewrite ^/([a-z]+)/api\.json$ /api.php?app=$1;
include php5;
}