Nginx – How to… DirectoryIndex to a folder

Try these:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

OK, so what you really need to be doing is:

1. Serve all static files from nginx, and only pass upstream to Apache any other requests.
2. When necessary for performance reasons, make the homepage a static file such as index.html in the document root. Thus, nginx will serve it directly. Delete it to return to the previous behavior.

Your configuration should look something like this:

server {
      root /usr/local/www/mydomain.com;
      server_name mydomain.com www.mydomain.com;

      index index.html;

      location @upstream {
            proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header Host $host;
            # Apache is listening on port 8080
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
      }

      location / {
            try_files $uri $uri/ @upstream;
      }
}

Later you should look at doing caching within your web app; if it writes generated HTML files to the disk, you could then have nginx serve those files directly out of its cache.