NGINX conditional Rewrite extensionless URLS - nginx

Question

I am trying to provide extensionless URLs for a client. The systems URLs will be generated without the extension in the navigation elements and links so I will have links that look like.
www.somesite.com
www.somesite.com/foo
www.somesite.com/foo/bar
www.somesite.com/bar/foo/barfoo
lets pretend for a moment that the calls will be either routed to a proxy that can handle a defined file extension or simply serve the html page if it exists. If the url is correctly rewritten then I would think a location command with a matching regex for the extension should work.
so behind the scenes we have.
www.somesite.com/index.abc
www.somesite.com/foo.def
www.somesite.com/foo/bar.abc
www.somesite.com/bar/foo/barfoo.def
...
with Apache .htaccess I can solve this problem by first testing for the existence of the page with a desired filetype.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.abc -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.abc [L]
I would also make sure that directory browsing is off and that trailing slashes would be removed
#ensure trailing slash is removed
RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)(?:/)$ $1 [R=301,L]
all well and good for Apache, and for me relatively intuitive, but this is NGINX and quite frankly I have no idea how to solve this use-case.
All the similar use cases I have found deal with html & php (How to remove both .php and .html extensions from url using NGINX?) and simply use try_files until they fall-through to a named location that rewrites the uri with .php extension. This would work if one is only dealing with a single dynamic language and fails miserably if we have two dynamic languages.
So the question is how do I do something similar in NGINX like can be done with the .htaccess condition/rewrite above
any help would be appreciated!
Cheers
Gary
UPDATE:
I have been able to get it "mostly" working by using the standard php approach. The issue is www.somesite.com is being directed to www.somesite.com/.php instead of serving the default document. Trailing slashes are also being removed correctly.
so to recap:
www.somesite.com - not working - www.somesite.com/.php
www.somesite.com/foo - working
www.somesite.com/foo/bar - working
www.somesite.com/bar/foo/barfoo - working
here my config:
location / {
index index.php index.html
autoindex off;
#remove trailing slash
rewrite ^/(.*)(?:/)$ /$1 permanent;
#try html files or route to named location
try_files $uri $uri.html #php;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
...
}
location #php {
rewrite ^(.*)$ $1.php last;
}
in other posts the try_files block looks like this: try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ #php; the problem is if I add $uri/ it will work for the default document e.g. serve www.somesite.com but all other urls like www.somesite.com/foo/ or www.somesite.com/foo/bar/ , which are also directories and have files of the same name, will be redirected to infinity instead of their respective pages.

Answer 1

Assuming that you have three ways to process an extensionless URI, you would need three location blocks. You can use try_files to test for the existence of a file by type, and cascade to the next location block in the chain, if the file is not found. See this document for details.
For example:
root /path/to/document/root;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ #php;
}
location #php {
try_files $uri.php #proxy;
fastcgi_pass ...;
...
}
location #proxy {
proxy_pass ...;
}
The first block processes normal files within the document root. You probably have a location ~ \.php$ block to process PHP files, and the second block is essentially a replica. The third block sends everything else upstream.