How to serve all existing static files directly with NGINX, but proxy to Apache the rest?

Question

location / {
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;

    if (-f $request_filename) {
        access_log off;
        expires 30d;
        break;
        }

    if (!-f $request_filename) {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; # Apache listening
        break;
        }
    }

Above will serve all existing files directly using Nginx (e.g. Nginx just displays PHP source code), otherwise forward a request to Apache. I need to exclude *.php files from the rule so that requests for *.php are also passed to Apache and processed.

I want Nginx to handle all static files and Apache to process all dynamic stuff.

EDIT: There is white list approach, but it is not very elegant, See all those extensions, I don't want this.

location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
    access_log off;
    expires 30d;
    }
location / {
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }

Answer 1

Try this:

location / {
    root /path/to/root;
    expires 30d;
    access_log off;
}

location ~* ^.*\.php$ {
    if (!-f $request_filename) {
        return 404;
    }
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
}

Hopefully it works. Regular expressions have higher priority than plain strings, so all requests ending in .php should be forwared to Apache if only a corresponding .php file exists. Rest will be handled as static files. The actual algorithm of evaluating location is here.