Drupal Clean URLs with NGINX

Nginx provides powerful rewrite commands in the servers' configuration, so it is flexible in its support for Clean URLs. The recommended settings from the Nginx Drupal Documentation are:

server {
     listen       80;
     server_name  example.org;
     location / {
         root   /path/to/drupal;
         index  index.php;
         error_page 404 = @drupal;
     }
     location @drupal {
         rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
     }
}

The key change is with the 404 line under location / and the location @drupalconfiguration section. This works by assuming that anything that isn't a reference to a specific file should be handled by Drupal via the rewrite rule.

Of course, you have to enable PHP by inserting the following codes:

        location ~ \.php$ {

                fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;

                # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

                # With php5-fpm:

                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;

                fastcgi_index index.php;

                include fastcgi_params;

        }

If you are looking for more information about installing Nginx, see Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support (LEMP) On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.