Multiple php-fpm pools and nginx

Question

I have a website which is built on Codeigniter 3. It is a typical nginx + php-fpm setup. Now I need to direct some of the requests to be handled by another php-fpm pool. Here is a simplified example of the configuration:

nginx configuration

test.conf:

server { server_name example.com; root /var/www/ci; index index.html index.php; location ~* \.(ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)(\?[0-9]+)?$ { expires max; log_not_found off; } # Somehow send all requests starting with /test/ to /index.php # but use 127.0.0.1:9001 instead of the default 127.0.0.1:9000 #location /test/ { # ... #} location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php; } location ~* \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; include fastcgi.conf; } } 

php-fpm configuration

www1.conf:

[www] user = www-data group = www-data listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 listen.owner = www-data listen.group = www-data pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 5 pm.start_servers = 2 pm.min_spare_servers = 1 pm.max_spare_servers = 3 

www2.conf:

[www2] user = www-data group = www-data listen = 127.0.0.1:9001 listen.owner = www-data listen.group = www-data pm = ondemand pm.max_children = 5 

How can I tell nginx to send every request starting with /test/ to the other pool (www2)?

Examples

• http://example.com/hello/world should still go to pool www1
• http://example.com/test/something should go to pool www2

Answer 1

This redirects all requests to PHP files under /test to another pool:

location ~*^/test/.+\.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9001; include fastcgi.conf; } 

To cover frameworks using front-controller pattern, this is needed:

location /test { root /path/to/webroot; try_files $uri $uri/ /test/index.php; } 

Answer 2

Looks like you can use nginx's map directive to achieve this.

First we add a map to the http block in nginx.conf:

http { # ... map $request_uri $upstream_port { default 9000; "~^/test($|/)" 9001; } # ... } 

We use a regular expression to check if the path starts with /test and select the php-fpm port number based on that.

Next we change test.conf to utilize this new variable:

server { server_name example.com; root /var/www/ci; index index.html index.php; location ~* \.(ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)(\?[0-9]+)?$ { expires max; log_not_found off; } location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php; } location ~* \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:$upstream_port; # <-- This changed include fastcgi.conf; } } 

I don't know if this will cause a significant performance penalty in the real world but in my synthetic tests the difference was fairly small. There might be a better way of doing this.