I have a server context which is rooted in a login application. The login application handles, well, logins, and then returns a redirect to "/app" on the same server if a login is successful. The application is rooted elsewhere, which is handled by the location block shown here:

location ^~ /app {
        alias /usr/share/nginx/www/website.com/content/public;
        location ~ \.php$ {
                try_files $uri =404;
                fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php5-fpm.sock;
                include fastcgi_params;
        }
}

This works just fine, however the $uri getting passed to PHP still contains /app, even though I am using alias rather than root. Because of this, the try_files directive fails to a 404 unless I link app -> ./ in /usr/share/nginx/www/website.com/content/public.

It's obviously silly to have that link in there, and if that link ever gets lost, bam dead website without an obvious cause.

The next thing I tried...

Was to remove the try_files directive entirely. This allowed me to rm the app link in my /public folder, and PHP had no problem locating the file and executing it. I used that to dump my $_SERVER global from PHP, and found that "SCRIPT_FILENAME" => "/usr/share/nginx/www/website.com/content/public/index.php" when the browser URI is /app.

This is exactly right. Based on my fastcgi_params below, this led me to beleive that try_files $request_filename =404; should work, but no dice. nginx still doesn't find the file, and returns 404.

So for right now, it will only work without any try_files directive. PHP finds the file, whereas try_files could not. I understand this may be a PHP security risk. Can anyone indicate how to move forward? The nginx logs don't contain anything relating to the failed try_files attempt, as far as I can see.

fastcgi_aparams

fastcgi_param   QUERY_STRING        $query_string;
fastcgi_param   REQUEST_METHOD      $request_method;
fastcgi_param   CONTENT_TYPE        $content_type;
fastcgi_param   CONTENT_LENGTH      $content_length;

fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME     $request_filename;
fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_NAME     $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param   REQUEST_URI     $request_uri;
fastcgi_param   DOCUMENT_URI        $document_uri;
fastcgi_param   DOCUMENT_ROOT       $document_root;
fastcgi_param   SERVER_PROTOCOL     $server_protocol;

fastcgi_param   GATEWAY_INTERFACE   CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param   SERVER_SOFTWARE     nginx/$nginx_version;

fastcgi_param   REMOTE_ADDR     $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param   REMOTE_PORT     $remote_port;
fastcgi_param   SERVER_ADDR     $server_addr;
fastcgi_param   SERVER_PORT     $server_port;
fastcgi_param   SERVER_NAME     $server_name;

fastcgi_param   HTTPS           $server_https;