Nginx ReWrite location to New API endpoints - nginx

Question

I am trying to move old API endpoints to new Restful (descriptive) endpoints. I have tried the below nginx configuration for rewriting old requests to the new endpoints but it is not working. Any help will be highly appreciated.
server {
listen 80;
root /path/to/api/entry/file;
index index.php;
server_name api.example.com;
#Below not rewriting http://api.example.com/create/ to http://api.example.com/users/v1/create
rewrite ^/create/ /users/v1/create last;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
fastcgi_buffers 256 16k;
fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
access_log /var/log/nginx/example_api-access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/example_api-error.log;
fastcgi_read_timeout 600;
}
}
An example to what am trying to achieve is rewrite http://api.example.com/create/ to http://api.example.com/users/v1/create and forward the request to the entry script (index.php) which will bootstrap the necessary controller to handle the request

Answer 1

Your rewrite...last doesn't achieve anything, as it's an internal process which eventually ends at /index.php. Your index.php script uses the original request (probably from the REQUEST_URI parameter) to determine the API endpoint.
You need to perform an external redirection using rewrite...permanent to make it visible to index.php. See this document for details.
For example:
rewrite ^/create/ /users/v1/create permanent;
Or more efficiently, and to work with POST and GET requests:
location /create/ { return 307 /users/v1/create$is_args$args; }
If you want to support the old API without a redirection, you will need to fool index.php with a dedicated location block, for example:
location /create/ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI /users/v1/create;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/index.php;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
Many of your fastcgi directives can be moved into the outer block, so that you do not need to write them twice. See this document for details.