Nginx with multiple locations serving some php files as download - php

Question

I have two directories, /home/php/www/public/ and /home/php/www/private/ and I would like to serve which one depending on the first part of the uri.
I would like /foo/ to act 'normally' in that it should serve which ever file is in the location, for example mysite.com/about would serve /public/about.php. However /private/ would always serve a single file no matter the request, for example mysite.com/private/foo, mysite.com/private/bar and mysite.com/private/foo/test would all serve /private/app.php.
I am probably in the 100s of different variations from what I have seen here and in other googles but being very new to all of this can't seem to piece together exactly what I need. After a few days of trial and error I am close to what I am after, mysite.com/about serves /public/about.php correctly and mysite.com/private/whatever gets /private/app.php but it doesn't execute it, it serves it as a download instead.
Here is what I have so far:
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /home/php/www/public;
index index.php;
server_name mysite.com;
location /private/ {
alias /home/php/www/private;
try_files /app.php =404;
location ~ [^/]\.php(/|$) {
# location ~ \.php$ {
# fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
# fastcgi_index app.php;
# fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
# include fastcgi_params;
# return 302 https://google.com;
}
}
location / {
try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ #extensionless-php;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
}
location #extensionless-php {
rewrite ^(.*)$ $1.php last;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
}
If I replace everything inside the location /private/ block with just return 302 https://google.com it redirects successfully to google.com, so I know this location block is being returned but putting the same thing inside the location ~ \.php$ inside location /private/ nothing happens so to me it looks like it is not hitting this block, what am I missing? There aren't any errors in /var/log/nginx/error.log relating to this.

Answer 1

Try:
location /private/ {
root /home/php/www/private;
try_files /app.php =404;
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.2-fpm.sock;
}
Use root rather than alias as you are not trying to alias the original request. The file was downloaded because of the unnecessary nested location block.