Multilanguage store as symlinked subdirectory on nginx returning 'no route to page'

Question

we needed to set-up our multi language store using the subdirectory/symlink method described here. (read why @ bottom)

How we did it. We copied index.php to a subdirectory and symlinked all folders. The base url was set to domain.com/en

Problem/Question Now when I open domain.com/en I can see the website and it shows the English version. Only thing is that all category and product links produce a 'no route to page' error. Instead of showing the category or product. Now how can this be?

Example So https://domain.com/en/funkyshoes does not open the category funkyshoes, and neither does funkyshoes https://domain.com/funkyshoes for that matter. https://domain.com/en/funkyshoes returns => no route to page https://domain.com/funkyshoes returns => https://domain.com/en

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why not? because we have more than 1 multistore and cannot give every store a lang store_code like en/de/fr & also we have one multistore with different domains per store and the other using the /en, /de, /fr method from the main domain.

Answer 1

This is an NGINX problem.

Adding this to a conf file solved our problem

location /en {
 rewrite ^/en(.*)$ /en/index.php last;
}

Answer 2

An even better solution is:

location / { try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite; } location @rewrite { rewrite /(../)? /$1index.php?$args; }

because we had some special location rules for catalog|checkout|customer. The problem being that thay all referenced @rewrite - this way we had to rewrite ALL the location commands that were set-up to also have a separate match for /en and later /fr and /de .....

So we came up with the simplest fallback rewrite that test first for / and then for /(two-letter code) .... and rewrites based on that

seems to work fine

In addition the store_code lookup needs to be altered. Because of the /en the http_host variable or server variable do no longer work.

A possible solution can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30078679/nginx-conf-w-multiple-maps-to-same-variable