Support

Hello,

did you take a look at official Joomla documentation about NginX? https://docs.joomla.org/Nginx

Set "Enable SEF URLs" to Yes and create the new .htaccess.

The bit of code you are referring to is actually part of the following stanza:

# Allow access to the front-end index.php file
location ~* ^/$ {
	return 301 /index.php;
}
location ^/index.php$ {
	$fastcgi_pass_block
	break;
}

Where $fastcgi_pass_block is the configured code to tell NginX to pass the file through FastCGI.

This is a side-effect of NOT wanting to use SEF URLs: everything must go through your site's index.php file, including the site's root. Otherwise NginX would try to create a folder index (and in some cases fail, which is the secondary reason for the recirect). This would make / and /index.php appear as two different URLs to search engines, leading to duplicate content issues. So we have to redirect / to /index.php to avoid this issue.