Nginx - Treats PHP as binary

Question

We are running Nginx+FastCgi as the backend for our Drupal site. Everything seems to work like fine, except for this one url. http:///sites/all/modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/smimage/index.php

(We use TinyMCE module in Drupal, and the url above is invoked when user tries to upload an image)

When we were using Apache, everything was working fine. However, nginx treats that above url Binary and tries to Download it. (We've verified that the file pointed out by the url is a valid PHP file)

Any idea what could be wrong here?

I think it's something to do with the NGINX configuration, but not entirely sure what that is.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Config: Here's the snippet from the nginx configuration file:

      root /var/www/;
       index index.php;

       if (!-e $request_filename) {
               rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
       }

       error_page 404 index.php;
       location ~*
\.(engine|inc|info|install|module|profile|po|sh|.*sql|theme|tpl(\.php)?|xtmpl)$|^(code-style\.pl|Entries.*|Repository|Root|Tag|Template)$
{
               deny all;
       }

       location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico)$ {
             access_log        off;
           expires           7d;
       }

       location ~* ^.+\.(css|js)$ {
             access_log        off;
           expires           7d;
       }

       location ~ .php$ {
           include /etc/nginx/fcgi.conf;
           fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8888;
           fastcgi_index index.php;
           fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME   $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
           fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING     $query_string;
           fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD   $request_method;
           fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE     $content_type;
           fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH   $content_length;
       }

       location ~ /\.ht {
               deny  all;
       }

Answer 1

Make it

location ~ \.php$ {

instead of

location ~ .php$ {

Answer 2

If that didn't do it, also be sure that you have fastcgi running on port 8888. You can check that with:

netstat -la | grep :8888

You're okay if you get a response like:

tcp        0      0 localhost:9000          *:*                     LISTEN

Or try the following and look for which port it is listening on:

netstat -la | grep LISTEN

Answer 3

Maybe the php file is running but generating a binary file. Is this script generating an image? Hard to tell without seeing some config.