Good evening everyone or possible early morning if you are in my neck of the woods. My problem seems trivial but after several hours of testing, researching and fiddling I can't seem to get this simple nginx rewrite function to work. There are several rewrites we need, some will have multiple parameters but I cant even get this simple 1 parameter current url to alter at all to the desired. Current: website.com/public/viewpost.php?id=post-title Desired: website.com/public/post/post-title Can someone kindly point me to as what I have done wrong, I am baffled / very tired... For testing purposes before we launch we were just using a simple port on the server. Here is that section. # Listen on port 7774 for dev test server { listen 7774; server_name localhost; root /usr/share/nginx/html/paa; index index.php home.php index.html index.htm /public/index.php; location ~* /uploads/.*\.php$ { if ($request_uri ~* (^\/|\.jpg|\.png|\.gif)$ ) { break; } return 444; } location ~ \.php$ { try_files $uri @rewrite =404; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_pass php5-fpm-sock; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } location @rewrite { rewrite ^/viewpost.php$ /post/$arg_id? permanent; } } I have tried countless attempts such as above @rewrite and simpler: location / { rewrite ^/post/(.*)$ /viewpost.php?id=$1 last; } location ~ \.php$ { try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_pass php5-fpm-sock; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } I can not seem to get anything to work at all, I have tried changing the location tried multiple rules... Please tell me what I have done wrong. Pause for facepalm [relocated from stack overflow as per mod suggestion]