Serve (almost) all index.php request by /index.php

[Lorenzo Milesi]

Hi.
Is it possible to have all index.php request being processed by /index.php?
I have a Joomla+VirtueMart website I recently moved from apache to nginx (can't compare performances, nginx is ages faster and has far far less impact on the server itself! Congratulations!!)-
With the old setup urls like /something/index.php were forwarded to file /index.php. This is apache's htaccess:
 Options +FollowSymLinks
 RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)file_id=([^&]*)(&|$)
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/oldfiles
 RewriteRule .* http://www.supersamastore.it/oldfiles/index.php [L,R=301]
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} base64_encode[^(]*\([^)]*\) [OR]
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C)([^s]*s)+cript.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR]
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
 RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|\[|\%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
 RewriteRule .* index.php [F]
 RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index\.php
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /component/|(/[^.]*|\.(php|html?|feed|pdf|vcf|raw))$ [NC]
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/server-status
 RewriteRule .* index.php [L]

Now with nginx it gives 404 not found.
Is it possible to do such config? all request requiring index.php and when the file doesn't exist on disk it should be served by /index.php.

Thanks

This is my current config:
server {
        listen 81 default_server;

        root   /var/www/nginx-default;
        index  index.php index.html index.htm;
        client_max_body_size 3M;

        # Make site accessible from http://localhost/
        server_name localhost;

        location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
        }

        # deny running scripts inside writable directories
        location ~* /(images|cache|media|logs|tmp)/.*\.(php|pl|py|jsp|asp|sh|cgi)$ {
                return 403;
                error_page 403 /403_error.html;
        }

        location ~ .php$ {
                fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
                fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index  index.php;
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                include fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_intercept_errors        on;
                fastcgi_ignore_client_abort     off;
                fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;
                fastcgi_send_timeout 180;
                fastcgi_read_timeout 180;
                fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
                fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;
                fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
                fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
        }
        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
                deny  all;
        }
        # caching of files 
        location ~* \.(ico|pdf|flv)$ {
                expires 30d;
        }

        location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|swf|xml|txt)$ {
                expires 14d;
        }

}

-- 
Lorenzo Milesi - lorenzo.milesi at yetopen.it

YetOpen S.r.l. - http://www.yetopen.it/