Nginx redirect with/without php extension - php

Question

I am building an NGINX virtual host that should:
redirect pages ending with .php to the version without extension (301 redirect)
properly handle URLs not ending with .php by passing them to FASTCGI for php execution
My issue is that this will in effect create an infinite redirect loop. What am I missing here?
server {
server_name ~^my\.domain\.com$;
listen 80;
root /path/to/root;
error_page 404 /404.php;
location ~ \.php$ {
rewrite ^(.*)\.php$ $1 permanent;
break;
}
location / {
index index.php;
try_files $uri $uri/ #extensionless-php;
}
location #extensionless-php {
rewrite ^(.*)$ $1.php last;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
# rest of fastcgi configuration...
}
}

Answer 1

For a start, you cannot have two location ~ \.php$ blocks. The solution is to process the fastcgi_pass within the named location itself and avoid the internal rewrite to .php. Something like this:
location / {
try_files $uri #php;
}
location #php {
try_files $uri.php $uri/index.php =404;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_pass ...;
}
location ~* ^(.*)\.php$ {
return 301 $1;
}
Notice that the index directive and the $uri/ elements are no longer required.