nginx configuration - redirect if file exists

Question

I'm transitioning a php application written by someone else from apache to nginx.

the developer has this in .htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s RewriteRule ^(.*)$ api.php?rquest=$1 [QSA,NC,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ api.php [QSA,NC,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -s RewriteRule ^(.*)$ api.php [QSA,NC,L] </IfModule> 

I read this briefly as
"if the file/directory does not exist, rewrite the request to be for api.php?rquest=$uri"
"if the file/directory does exist, rewrite the request to be for api.php"

I tried replicating this in nginx but running into issue. i created a location directive with

location / { # if the file or folder doesn't exist add it as arguments to api.php try_files $uri $uri/ /api.php?rquest=$uri&$args; index api.php; } 

and what i want to do is just direct to a static index.html page somewhere if the file/directory does exist.

I tried server level "if" statement with rewrite

if (-e $request_filename){ rewrite ^(.*)$ /api.php break; } 

but this breaks other valid location directives.

How do I accomplish this: if the file/directory does exist, redirect to a static html page

---------------- Update ---------------

I finally ended up with something like

server { ... root /home/ballegroplayer/api/public; index index.php index.html index.htm; try_files $uri $uri/ /api.php?rquest=$uri&$args; if (-e $request_filename){ rewrite ^(.*)$ /api.php last; } location ~ \.php$ { include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; } } 

Ultimately, in the "if" statement we can't redirect to a static file because after the "try_files" directive succeeds we get redirected to api.php which does exist and would cause the "if" statement to be triggered and we would always get the static html page.

Answer 1

I think using last instead of break solves the issue, since that makes nginx not to re-process the locations with the rewritten URL path.