Simple Nginx config for Magento

UPDATE: Magento 1.4.0 has since been released and my new configuration for Nginx is more recent.

Magento comes with rewrite rules designed for Apache and these work well out of the box. They are actually located in .htaccess files in appropriate locations so all that is often needed is to ensure the rewrite module is loaded and Magento is told about it.

I have started using Nginx for my Magento hosting and constructing an appropriate config file is very important. Of the resources spread around there are some very convoluted Nginx configurations so a clean and simple implementation was a goal. See how this goes:

server {
  server_name example.com;
  root /var/www/vhost/example.com/htdocs;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log main;
  index index.php;

  # set a nice expire for assets
  location ~* "^.+\.(jpe?g|gif|css|png|js|ico|pdf|zip|tar|t?gz|mp3|wav|swf)$" {
    expires    max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
  }

  # if the file exists just serve it
  if (-f $request_filename) {
    break;
  }

  # the downloader has its own index.php that needs to be used
  location ~* ^(/downloader|/js|/404|/report)(.*) {
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass php5;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$1/index.php$1;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 600;
  }

  # catch rewritten and standard URLs
  location ~* ^(/index.php)?(.*) {
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_pass php5;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root/index.php$1;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 600;
  }

}

I pass all PHP calls to an upstream server called ‘php5’ which allows me to configure it separately. I also do not have the fastcgi timeout as high as Magento wants (18000 seconds) but high enough for some larger processes like imports.

The important part is in the ‘location’ regular expressions and the fact that there are two locations being caught. The first one catches URLs with ‘downloader’ in them which is for the Magento Connect extension manager. These need to be passed to the index.php script in the downloader directory.

The final location section should catch all other URLs and pass them all to the root index.php script. It also allows for URLs of the form ‘/index.php/admin/’ by recognising it in the expression.

This is being used with Nginx 0.7.64 and seems to work fine. Obviously if you find an error or improvement I would like to know about it!

Magento 1.4

The release candidate for Magento 1.4 is out and this config can be changed to suit. Essentially you just remove the ‘js’, ‘404’ and ‘report’ parts of the location regular expression as these folders no longer exist. But things could change!