We all know that there are millions of websites were built with Joomla CMS, we also know that NginX is a better choice than Apache to run Joomla websites. However, NginX does NOT support Joomla SEF (URL rewriting) natively and automatically.

If a Joomla website Admin want to enable SEF on an Apache server, he just click on those buttons at Joomla backend (admin) settings, then Apache will automatically "read" the file named ".htaccess" in Joomla root and follow directives in this file to rewrite original dynamic URLs to SEF URLs.

But, if the same Joomla website is running on NginX, the site Admin can not be so lucky to enable SEF in such a easy way. He has to modify/create some "conf" file of NginX server itself, that means some files outside the Joomla installation folder, and also means it is very difficult since most users on shared hosting do NOT have access to those "conf" files.

I think NginX team should consider to add some NATIVE support for Joomla SEF rules to make these issues easier to solve.

Maybe you can add some "if .. then ... " directives into the NginX default configuration file(s) to let it AUTOMATICALLY detect if the website is Joomla, if that is true, then "read" the ".htaccess" file and convert those rules into NginX rewriting rules and execute them. For the site Admin, he only need to enable those options in Joomla settings, then he can enjoy his SEF URLs running smoothly.

Thank you.

You can do this already with try_files and some Lua code but all in all it's not recommended to do this because this will kill performance eventually due to the fact each access request also means a file access request which on its own is a blocking operation.

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nginx for Windows http://nginx-win.ecsds.eu/

Do you mean SEF should not be used? If SEF is Off, how can I get SEF URLs? You mean we should use dynamic original un-friendly URLs?

https://docs.joomla.org/Enabling_Search_Engine_Friendly_(SEF)_URLs_on_Nginx

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nginx for Windows http://nginx-win.ecsds.eu/

Thank you for your reply, but I had already read that article and tried that method but failed.

I even had asked similar question on Joomla official forum and user group, but they said "nginx team should do something to support Joomla better".

Do you know "VestaCP", please see it at: https://vestacp.com/ .

I use VestaCP to build my web server, it will AUTOMATICALLY install NginX and PHP and MySQL and etc., but that nginx installation has different configuration files, so I can not find the correct place to insert those code provided in that wiki doc you had mentioned.

My suggestion is: could you please improve nginx options so it will be more easier to enable/disable SEF for Joomla? You know Joomla is world leading CMS, so this improvements will benefit millions of websites.

For example, if I use VestaCP to offer my web environment, how can I configure the NingX installed by VestaCP to apply those SEF rules for Joomla?

Thank you.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/09/2016 07:33PM by baijianpeng.