Hi Igor,

Thanks a lot for the reply.

Below are what I want:
1. some static files can be directly accessed. but also, access static files with a fake query string is also allowed since this is useful to walk around browser cache for debug purpose
e.g. /favor.ico or /favor.ico?xxx=yyy => /new_path/favor.ico

2. all other request will be passed to a single PHP file 'common.php', but search engine friendly url needs to be parsed into files + query strings.
e.g. /module/func/param1-value1-param2-value2...<any-file-extension> => /common.php?__mod__=module&__func__=func&param1=value1&param2=value2...

3. common.php will be handled by upstream PHP fastcgi env.

4. prevent any direct access to /common ....

Usually, 2 is done by many web frameworks on the application level, but I want to make it into the web server to see if there's a tiny performance gain. I've already done above for Apache and Lighttpd. Both work well.

Since Nginx ignores rewrite flag 'break' or 'last' on the server level and no 'N|Next' flag like Apache, rewrite rules to achieve above took me some time. My solution is as below. [u]Any suggestions to make it better?[/u]

As I've asked, [u]is there a hidden config directive to control the number of internal rewrite cycles?[/u] The current value 10 restricts the number of params to only 7, namely /module/func/param1-value1-param2-value2-p3-v3-p4-v4-p5-v5-p6-v6-p7-v7 (no more p-v pairs on the tail).

[code]
server {
...

root /var/html/webroot;

...

location / {
rewrite ^/favicon.ico$ /frontend/template/default/img/favicon.ico break;
rewrite ^/img/(.*\.(jpg|png|gif))$ /frontend/template/default/img/$1 break;
rewrite ^/js/(.*\.js)$ /frontend/template/default/js/$1 break;
rewrite ^/b_js/(.*\.js)$ /bframe/frontend/cache/js_cache/$1 break;
rewrite ^/css/(.*\.css)$ /frontend/template/default/css/$1 break;
rewrite ^/html/(.*)$ /frontend/html/$1 break;
rewrite ^(.*)$ :///:$1;
}
location :///: {
rewrite ^:///:/common(|[.\-/]+.*)$ :///////:/?__mod__=404 last;
rewrite ^:///:/([^.\-/=&]+)[\-/]*(.*) :///:$2?__mod__=$1;
rewrite ^:///:([^.\-/=&]+)[\-/]*(.*) :///:$2?__func__=$1;
rewrite ^:///:(.*)$ ://///:$1;
}

location ://///: {
rewrite ^://///:([^.\-/=&]+)[\-/]([^.\-/=?&]+)[\-/]*(.*) ://///:$3?$1=$2 last;
rewrite ^://///:(.*)$ :///////:$1;
}

location :///////: {
rewrite .* /path/to/common.php break;
include /home/y/conf/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
}
}
[/code]