NginX Causing PHP File To Be Executed Twice

Question

I'm between a rock and a hard place trying to figure out why this is going on. For some reason, when I open my website the index.php file is being executed. I have been able to narrow it down to NginX/PHP-FPM by adding file_put_contents('runs.txt', 'executed'.PHP_EOL, FILE_APPEND); to the top of index.php and executing it using the website and the command line. If I execute it from the command line, it only outputs one executed, while if I execute it from the website (via NginX) it outputs two executed. The script is also not redirecting to itself because it is just returning a 200 response code. Besides having to use more memory by executing the script twice, it also screws up CSRF protection by having the CSRF be generated a second time and therefore the CSRF is useless.

Below is my nginx configuration files:

nginx.conf

user  nginx;
worker_processes  2;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    # Upstream to abstract backend connection(s) for PHP.
    upstream php {
        #this should match value of "listen" directive in php-fpm pool
        server unix:/var/lib/php-fpm.sock;
    }

    #gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
}

php.conf

# Pass all .php files onto a php-fpm/php-fcgi server.
location ~ \.php$ {
        #NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini

        include fastcgi_params;

        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 600s;
#       fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
        fastcgi_pass php;
}

website.conf

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  xyz.com www.xyz.com;
    root         /usr/share/nginx/xyz.com;
    #access_log  /usr/share/nginx/logs/xyz.com-access_log;
    error_log    /usr/share/nginx/logs/xyz.com-error_log;

    index index.php;

    location / {
       index index.php;

       try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
    }

    include php.conf;
}

fastcgi_params

fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param  HTTPS              $https if_not_empty;

fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx/$nginx_version;

fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

# PHP only, required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect
fastcgi_param  REDIRECT_STATUS    200;

If I change try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args; to try_files $uri $uri/; and bring up http://www.xyz.com/index.php then it will only execute once, but I need the /index.php?q=$uri&$args in there. I'm running CentOS 6.5 with nginx 1.4.4 and PHP 5.4.23. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I found out the problem. Since try_files would automatically redirect to index.php if the specified URI didn't exist, there was an image that was missing and when it opened, it opened index.php again.

I was able to determine the missing image was http://example.com/images/google.png so I found that image and placed it in the right folder (rather than being redirected back to index.php).

Another more proper solution would be to have a location /images block with a try_files statement in the website.conf file (before the location / block) that if the image does not exist, a 404 not found status code is sent.

location /images {
    try_files $uri =404;
}