Location - or how to setup sites in subfolders

[Daniel L. Miller]

On 4/29/2012 1:22 PM, Edho Arief wrote:
> 2012/4/30 Daniel L. Miller<dmiller at amfes.com>:
>> Note that I tried to add the "if" construct in php.conf based on a previous
>> post - and I gotta believe there's a better way to do this.  With or without
>> the if construct, the above site works - but only for egroupware.
[..]
>> Doesn't work right.  Can some kind soul help me not only fix this - but get
>> a better understanding of how to build these generic constructs?  Based on
>> experience with other servers, I can't believe folder-based controls in
>> nginx can be as difficult as I seem to be making it!
> Put "location ~ \.php$ { }" inside each "location ^~ /appname/ { }"
> block instead of globally so it looks like this:
>
> location ^~ /egroupware/ {
>    # if index.php's path is /opt/egroupware/index.php,
>    # use "root /opt" instead
>    root /opt/egroupware;
>    index index.php;
>    # and remove this
>    rewrite ^/egroupware/(.*)$ /$1 last;
>    # and update this accordingly
>    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$args;
>    location ~ \.php($|/) {
>      ...
>    }
> }
>

Thank you! - that helped quite a bit.  That way of thinking - of 
including the php handler inside each location, instead of a global php 
handler, just didn't seem as "elegant" to me - but I can see the power 
potential.

However - I still don't understand WHY it works - specifically, why I 
need to have "root /opt" instead of "root /opt/egroupware".  I'm 
inferring that the location path is automatically added to the declared 
root in processing.  But if that's the case, then to be able to declare, 
"location ^~ /lam/", and be able to reach a physical path of 
"/opt/ldap-account-manager-3.7", I need to add a symlink from the 
extended path to "/opt/lam".  And while I may in fact do so for other 
reasons - I WOULD like to be able to control exactly what nginx is 
doing, and better yet - understand the how/why.
-- 
Daniel