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Web / NGINX Interview questions

Why do we use try_files with a fallback to PHP-FPM in WordPress-style setups?

WordPress and similar PHP applications rely on a single front controller - typically index.php - to handle routing for URLs that don't correspond to a real file on disk, like /blog/my-post/.

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    include fastcgi_params;
}

try_files first checks whether the requested URI matches a real file, then a real directory, and only if neither exists falls back to passing the request to index.php with the original query string preserved. This lets NGINX serve actual static assets - images, CSS, uploaded media - directly and efficiently, while routing everything else through PHP-FPM, where WordPress's own router resolves the "pretty" URL internally.

Without this fallback, any URL that isn't a literal file path - which is most of WordPress's permalink structure - would return a 404 straight from NGINX before PHP ever got a chance to handle it.

What would happen to WordPress "pretty" permalink URLs without the try_files fallback?
What does try_files check before falling back to index.php?

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