I managed to get this to work a while back, but on returning to the cakephp project I had started it seems that whatever changes I've made to nginx recently (or perhaps a recent update) have broken my rewrite rules.

Currently I have:

worker_processes  1;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.php index.html index.htm;
        }

        location /basic_cake/ {
            index  index.php;

            if (-f $request_filename) {
              break;
            }
            if (!-f $request_filename) {
              rewrite ^/basic_cake/(.+)$ /basic_cake/index.php?url=$1 last;
              break;
            }
        }

        location /cake_test/ {
            index  index.php;

            if (-f $request_filename) {
              break;
            }
            if (!-f $request_filename) {
              rewrite ^/cake_test/(.+)$ /cake_test/index.php?url=$1 last;
              break;
            }
        }

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }

        # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
        #
        location ~ \.php$ {
            root           html;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    }

    server {
        listen       8081;
        server_name  localhost;

        root /srv/http/html/xsp;

        location / {
            index  index.html index.htm index.aspx default.aspx;
        }

        location ~ \.(aspx|asmx|ashx|asax|ascx|soap|rem|axd|cs|config|dll)$ {
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9001;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    }

}

The problem that I have is that the css and images will not load from the webroot. Instead if I visit http://localhost/basic_cake/css/cake.generic.css, I get a page which tells me:

CakePHP: the rapid development php framework Missing Controller

Error: CssController could not be found.

Error: Create the class CssController below in file: app/controllers/css_controller.php

var $name = 'Css'; } ?>

Notice: If you want to customize this error message, create app/views/errors/missing_controller.ctp CakePHP: the rapid development php framework

Does anybody have any ideas on how to fix this?