Nginx doesn't send _SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] to PHP-fpm

Question

This is part of my nginx configuration file:

# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
    root           html;
    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}

Almost the website loads because the location of / is also set to /var/www on this config file.

location / {
    root   /var/www;
    index  index.php index.html index.htm;
}

When I use phpinfo() and read PHP variables table, I noticed this:

_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]    /usr/share/nginx/html

Other variables (most of them configured in nginx.conf)as server name, script filename, etc, were sent to php. So, nginx doesn't sending this variable to PHP. What I have to do?

I'm using PHP 5.3.8 and nginx 0.8

Answer 1

$document_root is set by the root directive. The 'root html;' line in the php location sets $document_root to <nginx prefix>/html. Take a look at https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/tutorials/config_pitfalls/#root-inside-location-block to see how you should be setting your root in the server context. It should look something like this:

server {
  root /var/www;
  index index.php index.html index.htm;

  location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
  }
}

Answer 2

I'm using nginx 1.0.6, and this is in my fastcgi_params:

fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;

Not sure if this will help you on 0.8, but updating nginx will help if not.