Simulating "fake" directories using PHP, without .htaccess, mod_rewrite, or 404 redirects

Question 1

Well, I figured out what was going on: I had a misconfigured nginx server.

Marc B's answer, though related to Apache, prompted me to check out my PATH_INFO value — lo and behold, PATH_INFO was nonexistent, even for requests like GET /other.php/something_else.

Some more searching turned up the answer. Using nginx's fastcgi_split_path_info to split the URI into a) the path to the script and b) the path that appears following the script name will fail if done after a use of the try_files directive, due to its rewriting the URI to point to a file on the disk. This obliterates any possibility of obtaining a PATH_INFO string.

As a solution, I did three things (some of these are probably redundant, but I did them all, just in case):

In a server's location block, make use of fastcgi_split_path_info before setting up PATH_INFO via
```
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
```
...and do both before making use of try_files.
Store $fastcgi_path_info as a local variable in case it ever changes later (e.g. with set $path_info $fastcgi_path_info;)
When using try_files, don't use $uri... use $fastcgi_script_name. (Pretty sure this was my biggest mistake.)

Sample Configuration

server {

    # ... *snip* ...

    location ~ \.php {
        # NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;

        include fastcgi_params;

        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;

        try_files $fastcgi_script_name =404;
    }

    # ... *snip* ...

}

Where fastcgi_params contains:

set            $path_info         $fastcgi_path_info;
fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO          $path_info;
fastcgi_param  PATH_TRANSLATED    $document_root$path_info;

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

# ... *snip* ...

Reference

The following links explain the problem pretty well and provide an alternate nginx configuration:

Question 2

 GET /other.php/something_else

This is called PATH_INFO in Apache. As Apache's scanning down a URL's "directories", it will return the first file (or execute the first script) that is actually a file/script, e.g.

GET /foo/bar/baz/index.php/a/b/c/
     ^--dir
         ^--dir
             ^---dir
                 ^---script
                         ^^^^^^^--- path_info

In real terms, the real request is for

GET /foo/bar/baz/index.php

and then Apache will take the unused trailing portion of the directory structure of the URL and turn it into path info. In PHP, you'll have

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] = '/foo/bar/baz/index.php';
$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = 'a/b/c';

Simulating "fake" directories using PHP, without .htaccess, mod_rewrite, or 404 redirects

Situation

Research

Questions

References

Sample Configuration

Reference