Manual:Short URL/Page title - nginx, Root Access, PHP as a CGI module

This example configuration:

• Known to work with MediaWiki 1.13.x, 1.14.x, 1.15.x and 1.17.x It has not been tested with earlier versions.
• Was designed for an Ubuntu Linux distribution. It should work under other Linux distributions with minor tweaking. It should work in Windows as well with more tweaking to the folder paths.
• The wiki is installed in the root html/http directory
• Pages will be accessed at example.com/Page_Title or www.example.com/Page_Title
• Page can still be accessed with example.com/index.php/Page_Title and example.com/index.php?title=Page_Title. This is great since if your wiki has been up previously old search engine links and bookmarks will continue to work.
• Viewing File:Image.jpg files and similar with a period in the name will work with this setup.
• Static files will be served with max expiration header to reduce load on the server.
• This configuration will work with robots.txt and other files stuck in the root directory. This script checks for the existence of the file before passing it off to MediaWiki.

The following nginx configuration can be added directly into the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file for a server hosting one site or into a /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com file setup for a server with multiple sites. Make sure to change the server_name, the root, and access/error log file names. The location to PHP FastCGI may need to

server {
        server_name www.example.com example.com;
        listen 80;
        
        root /home/user/public_html;
        index  index.php index.html index.htm;

        access_log  /var/log/nginx/access-example.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/error-example.log;
        
        location ~ \.htaccess {
                deny all;
        }

        location / {
                if (!-e $request_filename) {
                        rewrite ^/([^?]*)(?:\?(.*))? /index.php?title=$1&$2 last;
                }
                if ($uri ~* "\.(ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)(\?[0-9]+)?$") {
                        expires max;
                        break;
                }
        }

        location ~* \.php$ {
                if (!-e $request_filename) {
                        return 404;
                }

                include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;

                fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index index.php;

                fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;             
        }
}

• Edit the LocalSettings.php file in the root html directory and add/update these settings:

$wgScriptPath       = "";
$wgArticlePath      = "/$1";
$wgUsePathInfo      = true;
$wgScriptExtension  = ".php";

If you added the configuration into a sites-available configuration folder make sure to create the symlink into the sites-enabled folder. Reload your nginx configuration by typing: /etc/init.d/nginx reload