WordPress Permalinks on Nginx

First open your nginx configuration file.

nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

But if you set up a virtual host, you should open the virtual host configuration for the host where you install wordpress. If you are using Debian, the configuration files is located at /etc/nginx/sites-available/. The following command should do that.

nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com

Now find the section location / . Add the following code inside the curly brackets {}.

if (!-e $request_filename) {
                rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
                break; } 

Below is virtual host sample configuration after adding the code above.

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  example.com;

    error_log   logs/error-example.log;
    access_log  logs/access-example.log;

    location / {
        root   /var/www/example.com;
        index  index.html index.htm index.php;

        #error_page 404 = /index.php?q=$request_uri;
         if (!-e $request_filename) {
                rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
                break; }
    }
    location ~ .php$ {
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/example.com$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

Now save the file and close the text editor. The changes will not take effect until you restart nginx. It’s totally different from Apache where you can edit .htaccess and don’t need to restart Apache in order to apply the change. So run the following command the restart nginx.

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Now you can log in to your wordpress blog and customize your permalinks to your liking.