Redirecting and rewriting in NGINX - redirect

Question

I'm trying to create a simple "Hello World"-like API and for that I need a rule to redirect/rewrite the URL to my API.
Let's say my file is called index.php, so whenever I make a GET to index.php I get a list of items.
The first thing I want to do is to redirect the URL mydomain.com/index.php to mydomain.com/api.
And second, when mydomain.com/api is accessed, I'd like the server to trigger the index.php file without rewriting the URL.
My current code looks like this:
location /api {
rewrite ^ $scheme://$host/index.php permanent;
}
location /index.php{
return 302 www.mydomain.com/api;
}
but it's not working as expected. Why and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

You need two rules for what you're trying to achieve.
The first one, the one that will receive requests and "translate" them to your under-the-hood script, should look like this:
rewrite ^/api\?(.+)$ /index.php?$1 last;
As for the second one, the one that should redirect all your users to the "beautiful" URL:
rewrite ^/index.php\?(.*)$ /api?$1 permanent;
Note that this second rule should be outside any location block and before any of those, as you're willing to redirect the user before anything else.
Cheers

Answer 2

# you don't need a rewrite. Use location with the "=" or exact match
location = /api {
alias /path/to/root;
index index.php;
}
location /index.php {
return 302 www.mydomain.com/api;
}
Hope it helps
Here is the second version of my answer using one redirect and an alias:
location /api {
alias /path/to/root;
index index.php;
}
# replace index.php with api
location /index.php {
rewrite (index\.php)(.*)$ /api$2 permanent;
}
My first solution did not forwarded the args. Reading #alexandernst solution gave a better idea of the problem.