I've been doing some work with NGINX of late and anyone familiar with CakePHP will know that it ships out of the box with Apache .htaccess files to make sure that the URL's are devoid of there query string. Anyway, enough talk, if you want to host cakephp on NGINX, you'll need to use a vhost like so: server { listen 80; server_name somedomain.com; access_log /var/www/logs/somedomain.access.log mai