An Nginx configuration for MediaWiki

There are several example Nginx configurations for MediaWiki floating around the web. Many of them don’t block the user from accessing things like /serialized/. Many of them also don’t correctly handle a wiki page named FAQ, since that is a name of a file in the MediaWiki root! In fact, the configuration used on the official Nginx Wiki has both of those issues!

This is because most of the configurations floating around basically try to pass all requests through, and blacklist certain requests, either denying them, or passing them through to index.php.

It’s my view that blacklisting is inferior to whitelisting in situations like this. So, I developed the following configuration that instead works by whitelisting certain paths.

root /path/to/your/mediawiki; # obviously, change this line

index index.php;
location /                     { try_files /var/empty @rewrite; }
location /images/              { try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite; }
location /skins/               { try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite; }
location /api.php              { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /api.php5             { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /img_auth.php         { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /img_auth.php5        { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /index.php            { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /index.php5           { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /load.php             { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /load.php5            { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /opensearch_desc.php  { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /opensearch_desc.php5 { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /profileinfo.php      { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /thumb.php            { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /thumb.php5           { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /thumb_handler.php    { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /thumb_handler.php5   { try_files /var/empty @php; }
location /wiki.phtml           { try_files /var/empty @php; }

location @rewrite {
    rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?title=$1&$args;
}

location @php {
    # obviously, change this according to your PHP setup
    include fastcgi.conf;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/wiki.sock;
}

We are now using this configuration on ParabolaWiki, but with an alias for location = /favicon.ico to the correct file in the skin, and with FastCGI caching for PHP.

The only thing I don’t like about this is the try_files /var/emtpy bits—surely there is a better way to have it go to one of the @ location blocks, but I couldn’t figure it out.