NGINX location fallback to Symfony - php

Question

I'm working on a legacy API project written in pure PHP and now trying to move it to Symfony 4 and need to make some changes to the NGINX configuration.
I am required to keep both the old and the new endpoints working at the same time, so my plan is to setup NGINX in a way that it tries to serve first the old endpoint and if it doesn't exist (since I plan to remove them as I migrate to Symfony) it redirects to Symfony's front controller.
The current directory structure is this:
So far my NGINX conf is like so:
server {
root /project/www;
index index.php;
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_pass php-fpm:9000;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
location ~ / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}
}
It works fine, if I request /api/client_status it uses the index.php under the client_status directory and if I remove that folder it uses Symfony's front controller.
The thing is that other applications are using these enpoints sometimes with index.php appended, e.g /api/client_status/index.php, and in these cases I get a 404 instead of being redirected to Symfony's front controller.
I tried rewriting at the top of the server block with rewrite ^/api/(.*)/index.php /api/$1; but it didn't help. Any input or even a suggestion of another approach is very welcome.

Answer 1

The URIs with index.php appended, will be processed by the location ~ \.php$. You need to add a try_files statement to this block to avoid the 404 responses, and instead send the requests to Symfony's front controller.
For example:
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
...
}