Getting Wordpress to Work With Nginx

Since Nginx does not use .htaccess files we need to convert all our .htaccess rules to Nginx. If you seen my previous tutorial on Nginx Catch All Rewrite then you will see the similarities here.

We basically just need to rewrite all non file/directory requests to index.php. If your WordPress site is set up at the root, meaning its at http://www.duchnik.com for example, then all you will simply need is this:

if (!-e $request_filename)
{
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 last;
        break;
}

If you have your blog setup in a separate directory like i do, so lets say http://websanova.com/tutorials then you will need to specify that directory.

if (!-e $request_filename)
{
        rewrite ^/tutorials/(.*)$ /tutorials/index.php?/$1 last;
        break;
}

You can also just combine the two, which is what I do, allowing me to run my framework and my blog separately.

if (!-e $request_filename)
{
        rewrite ^/tutorials/(.*)$ /tutorials/index.php?/$1 last;
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 last;
        break;
}

In the end you will get something that looks like this:

server {
        listen               81;
        listen               duchnik.com:81;
        server_name          duchnik.com www.duchnik.com;
        root                 /home/webadmin/www.duchnik.com/htdocs;
        index                index.html index.htm index.php;

        if (!-e $request_filename)
        {
                rewrite ^/tutorials/(.*)$ /tutorials/index.php?/$1 last;
                rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 last;
                break;
        }

        location ~ \.php$ {
                root /home/webadmin/www.duchnik.com/htdocs;

                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf;
        }
}