Right way to enable requests with method DELETE in nginx - rest

Question

I was writing a RESTful applicaiton in PHP and enabled DELETE, PUT requests for nginx.
location / {
root html;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
dav_methods PUT DELETE;
}
When I executed a REST Request with method DELETE, which I wanted to handle inside my index.php - nginx removed the html folder.
What is the right way to tell nginx to pass DELETE requests to my index.php ?

Answer 1

Nginx does not disable PUT or DELETE requests, but it does not allow these requests on a folder index. There isn't really anything that needs to be enabled with nginx (you should remove the dav_methods line), but you need to avoid accessing your index.php through the index directive like:
index index.php index.html index.htm;
Instead use try_files to match the index.php file ie like:
try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
In this case nginx wont complain about your DELETE method.

Answer 2

NginX executes those HTTP methods (DELETE, PUT) directly without even invoking PHP engine because they are handled by the DAV extension inside nginX.
To overcome the issue, you may use POST HTTP method for all of your API calls, but add additional custom header to indicate the actual REST method - instead of this
PUT /api/Person/4 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:10320
Content-Type: application/json
Cache-Control: no-cache
you will invoke this
POST /api/Person/4 HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:10320
Content-Type: application/json
X-REST-Method: PUT
Cache-Control: no-cache
and then in PHP you will check in this way
if($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REST_METHOD']!='')
switch($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REST_METHOD'])
{
case 'PUT':
...
break;
case 'PATCH':
...
break;
case 'DELETE':
...
break;
}