Friendly urls & URL rewrites in NGINX?

[brfcs]

Can someone tell me, or point me towards documentation that tells me how friendly URLs are put together?

I'm trying to convert a site that has had friendly URLs switched on for a long time, but I'm trying to enable URL rewrites to kind of finish the job.

My current config for NGINX looks like this:

location / {
    index     index.php index.html index.htm;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$uri&$args;
    root      /var/www/ips/;
}

I thought that might do it, and it works for bits, but not everything.

For example the URL

http://example.com/forums/ gets translated correctly to http://example.com/index.php?/forums/ which works, but a topic URLlike https://example.com/forums/topic/12345-this-is-a-topic/ ends up with a too many redirects error.

I suspect I should be using the rewrite directive rather than try files, but I've not figured out the right config yet ... has anyone else configured this already?

[CoffeeCake]

The great thread by @Makoto above addresses your question and more.