Trouble adding /pma location to all virtual hosts

[Francis Daly]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 10:22:21AM -0400, Ben Johnson wrote:

Hi there,

> I was able to accomplish my objective with some help from the tutorial
> at:

It's good that you've got it working now.

There are a few things that you might like to consider when deploying
it across all vhosts.

First: for a request, nginx picks one server and then one location
to process things in. So for this configuration to be common across
multiple servers, you either must copy-paste it into each; or else put
it in an external file and "include" that file in each per-server config
that matters.

> location /pma {

Next, you probably want this to become "location ^~ /pma" -- or maybe
even "location ^~ /pma/", with a separate "location = /pma {return 301
/pma/;}" block.

http://nginx.org/r/location for the details of why that is.

(Hint: try to access /pmap, or /index.php, and you may see that things
go wrong.)

>    root /var/www/;
>    index index.php index.html index.htm;
>    location ~ ^/pma/(.+\.php)$ {
>        try_files $uri =404;
>        root /var/www/;

That line, because it is identical to the enclosing one, probably does
nothing useful and can be removed.

>        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
>        fastcgi_param HTTPS on;

You may be able to use the $https variable there, if you want to share
this config with both http and https servers *and* want to tell the
php server the truth about the original connection. But that's not
critical here.

>        fastcgi_index index.php;
>        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
>        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
>    }
>    location ~* ^/pma/(.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html|xml|txt))$ {
>        root /var/www/;
>    }

That 3-line section, I don't think does anything useful as-is.

With it, requests that match are served from the filesystem below
/var/www/; while requests that don't match are served from the filesystem
below /var/www/.

Without it, requests won't match and so will be served from the filesystem
below /var/www/.

> }
> location /PMA {
>        rewrite ^/* /pma last;
> }

That will match both /PMA and /PMA/, which are probably what you want.

It will also match /PMAP, which may be unrelated; and it will match
/PMA/file.png and rewrite it to just /pma, which may not be wanted.

The rewrite itself could omit the "/*" part and have the same effect.

I would suggest actively redirecting to the correct /pma/ url, rather
than trying an internal rewrite -- but again, if what you have works
for you, it's good enough.

> I don't know if the key is the nested location block, or something else.
> If anyone is able to point-out the fundamental differences between the
> configuration snippet that I posted previously and the snippet above,
> which actually works, I would be most appreciative.

You posted a few snippets previously. That last ones where you reported
404s, I failed to reproduce the 404s. They worked for me.

Possibly there was something else in the full configuration that meant
that the location{}s you showed were not the chosen ones for the requests
you made?

	f
-- 
Francis Daly        francis at daoine.org