Best practice on FastCGI configuration to avoid ambiguous FCGI_PARAMS keys

[Christoph Schug]

Most of the times when configuring a FastCGI application it is just 
good enough to include the fastcgi.conf which ships with the Nginx 
distribution. On the other hand sometimes it is required to just change 
one or few of the definitions in that file, for example when the 
application resided outside document root. Practically something like

include                 fastcgi.conf;
fastcgi_param           DOCUMENT_ROOT   /foo/bar;

worked for me so far (in combination with php-fpm(8)). While debugging 
a different issue I also had a network sniffer running the traffic 
between Nginx and the FastCGI application server, I found out that Nginx 
takes that sort of configuration literally and transfers two 
DOCUMENT_ROOT parameters, first with the setting given in fastcgi.conf 
and then the one specified explicitly.

 From theoretical point of view one can argue that this is a 
configuration flaw, but from a practical point of view I wonder if it 
wouldn't make sense for Nginx to allow override of FCGI_PARAMS keys and 
just transfer the last definition. The FastCGI specification [1] is 
pretty vague on ambiguous FCGI_PARAMS keys and the order of processing. 
This basically passes the ball to the FastCGI application server to sort 
out what would be "best", e.g. take the very first value definition of a 
specific FCGI_PARAMS, the last one, role a dice, etc. This might lead to 
the situation where the same Nginx configuration could trigger different 
behavior dependent in which FastCGI application server would be used.

Again, I don't see this directly as Nginx's fault, the question is just 
of this is desirable for the ease of system administration to keep 
configurations compact and clear with still a well-defined behavior. 
Reducation of network traffic between Nginx and the FastCGI application 
would be another aspect.

Any other opinions on that?

-cs

[1] http://www.fastcgi.com/om_archive/kit/doc/fcgi-spec.html#S5.2