Imagine you need to run a Magento 2 installation from a sub-directory, using Nginx, but you don’t have ownership of the main site, just the sub-directory.

So we are not talking here about store view codes, redirect loops etc, we are talking about this:

Server 1 : www.website.domain
/shop/ -> IP Server 2
Server 2 : www.website.domain/shop/

The problem

Magento 2 has differences in terms of application structure and directories with Magento 1. (see image below)

The most important difference here is the endpoint. While in Magento 1 the endpoint is the index file of the Magento installation, “[magento]/index.php”, in Magento 2, the endpoint is inside the pub folder, “/[magento]/pub/index.php”.

Therefore all request for each store-view will go through this folder.

Create Subfolders

For each Base URL you have to add a sub-folder at the end, so if you need to have www.website.domain/shop You will need to create :

mkdir ~/[magento]/pub/shop

Create Symlinks

Then you need to create symlinks inside the sub-folder just created to the static content folders, like ‘media’, ‘static’… This is necessary because Magento 2 will go to gather this information inside the reference given by the endpoint, that is inside the “pub/shop” folder.

For example:

ln -s ../media media
ln -s ../static static

For the index.php, instead of symlink. You need to copy it and modify the relative path for the app/bootstrap script. Like follows:

Change:

require realpath(DIR) . ‘/../app/bootstrap.php’;

To:

require realpath(DIR) . ‘/../../app/bootstrap.php’;

Nginx Configuration

And finally, make sure that the entry point of the Nginx file points to the correct folder.

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

# PHP entry point for main application
location ~ (index|get|static|errors/report|errors/404|errors/503|health_check|__info)\.php$ {
    try_files $uri =404;
    fastcgi_pass   fastcgi_backend;
    fastcgi_buffers 16 16k;
    fastcgi_buffer_size 32k;

    fastcgi_param  PHP_FLAG  "session.auto_start=off \n suhosin.session.cryptua=off";
    fastcgi_param  PHP_VALUE "memory_limit=2048M \n max_execution_time=18000";
    fastcgi_read_timeout 600s;
    fastcgi_connect_timeout 600s;

    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    include        fastcgi_params;
}