Nginx subdirectory images broken

The rewrite block/rule you need is

location ~* ^.+\.(xml|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js|swf|mpeg|mp3|mov)$ {
		root   /path/to/www;
		rewrite ^.*/files(/.*)$ /wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 last;
}

I appreciate your willingness to help! I added that line the site seems to be acting like it doesn’t have a PHP handler, all files get downloaded instead of displayed. See https://news.jrn.msu.edu. Nginx rules are like a foreign language to me, though I do recognize some of the regex from .htaccess rules. Not sure what in that block would cause it to stop rendering files in the browser though.

When you attempt to load the file directly without the URL rewriting you also get a 404

https://news.jrn.msu.edu/lansingstar/wp-content/ms-files.php?file=/2015/05/20140908_124852_RichtoneHDR.jpg

Verify that the file exists & is accessible to the webserver (substitute blog id)

https://news.jrn.msu.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/{blogid}/files/2015/05/20140908_124852_RichtoneHDR.jpg

Yeah, the file is definitely there. I assume I still have something wrong with URL rewriting (though I hadn’t tried loading it using ms-files.php like that).

https://news.jrn.msu.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/7/files/2015/05/20140908_124852_RichtoneHDR.jpg

Sorry, just saw the wp-content when it should have been wp-includes

https://news.jrn.msu.edu/lansingstar/wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=/2015/05/20140908_124852_RichtoneHDR.jpg

Rewrite rules should not affect how the server/browser treat the file.

Try replacing the actual rule with

rewrite ^(.*)/files(/.*)$ /$1/wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 last;

Still no go, on a positive note it seems whatever bug was causing files to download instead of render we’ve got fixed now. Nginx log still implies it’s looking at /var/www/wordpress/lansingstar/files/2015/05/20140908_124852_RichtoneHDR.jpg for the file.

Where do you have that media rewriting block? It should be before any of the PHP rewriting blocks.

I had replaced line 16 in this order https://pastebin.com/BP2ekyf0 with the code but tried moving it to the top and it didn’t seem to change anything. If I put log_not_found on; in that server block I don’t seem to get any 404 reporting to the error log which makes me think that rule isn’t catching on the URL.

I ended up taking the location directive out and just adding this directly to the config which worked.

rewrite /files/(.+)$ /wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$1 last;

Glad you got it sorted.

For another time, the line below didn’t work because Nginx does not know what the blog id is on any request. WP handles the blog lookup in all requests after Nginx has handed the request off to the PHP backend.

try_files /wp-content/blogs.dir/$blogid/files/$rt_file /wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$rt_file ;

Thanks Timmmmyboy. That worked for me on my nginx multisite as well