Nginx with wordpress seo urls

I have been testing running my site with Nginx instead of Apache.  One of the issues I have ran across is getting wordpress to work right since I use the SEO urls.  Not that SEO urls make any difference, its a fun challenge to just work with.

One issue I ran across is getting these urls to work right.  After some reading, I did discover that there is a simple code for the rewrite that is used in apache.  However I couldn’t get this to work as the document examples showed.  I found out after testing, that it must exist in the location attribute.  Which is actually better for the setup.

        location / {
                root   /home/sites/sleepycode.com/public_html;
                index  index.php index.html index.htm;

                # Send a expire header for static files.
                if ($request_uri ~* "\.(ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)\?[A-Za-z0-9\.-_]+$")
                {
                        expires 30d;
                        break;
                }

                # Handle wordpress pretty urls.
                if (!-e $request_filename)
                {
                        rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
                }
        }

This makes things work as they should.

Update:

If has been suggested by the Nginx team to be avoided.  So here is another solution that avoids if:

        # Handle wordpress pretty urls.
        location /
        {
                try_files $uri @wordpress;
        }
        location @wordpress
        {
                rewrite "^/(\d{4})/(\d{2})/(.+)$" /index.php?q=$1 last;
        }