remove .php from url with rewrite rule - php

Question

I want to rewrite the url in nginx so that the .php extension can be omitted.
This is what I have, but this isn't working for me. Anyone any idea how to do this?
Thanks.
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
return 301 $scheme://www.example.com$request_uri;
}
server {
listen 80;
root /usr/share/nginx/www;
index index.php;
server_name www.example.com;
error_page 404 http://www.example.com/404.php;
autoindex off;
error_log /usr/share/nginx/www/nginx_error.log warn;
location / {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /$1.php;
}
location = / {
rewrite ^ /index.php;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
}
this is my whole config file.

Answer 1

Spent a while trying to get this to work properly. Both php files and other assets working:
location / {
if (!-e $request_filename){
rewrite ^(.*)$ /$1.php;
}
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}

Answer 2

#Makromat I think the 404 issue you are mentioning in the comments is that your / location is resolving to /.php without a file name, so to solve it we might add another location just to handle this special case
location / {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /$1.php;
}
location = / {
rewrite ^ /index.php;
}
Try this and tell me if it works
EDIT:
Ok scratch that, I have a better idea, the first case will fail if the original URL already contains the .php extension so it's better to define it as a fall back solution, try this
location / {
try_files $uri $uri.php $uri/;
}
Try replace this with your current php block
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}

Answer 3

Something like this should be what you are looking for.
location ^/(.*)$ {
rewrite ^(.*)$ /$1.php;
}