Phalcon + Nginx Routes / Rewrites not working

I finally got Phalcon+phpfpm+nginx on a Osx to work... trying to setup a quick REST application I am stuck, I believe with an nginx rewrite.

I am always getting a Route not matched error.

File Structure:

/myapp/
  public/
    index.php
  app/
    models/
    ...

index.php

<?php

$app = new \Phalcon\Mvc\Micro();

$app->get('/api/robots', function() {

    echo json_encode(['true']);
});

$app->notFound(function(){

    echo json_encode(['Route Not Found']);
});

$app->handle();

nginx config file:

worker_processes  1;
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}
http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    #gzip  on;


server {
    root    /var/www/bmex/public;
    listen       80;
    server_name  some.name.com;

    charset      utf-8;

    #access_log  /var/log/nginx/host.access.log  main;

    set $root_path '/var/www/bmex/public';

    location / {
        root   $root_path;
        index  index.php index.html index.htm;

        # if file exists return it right away
        if (-f $request_filename) {
            break;
        }

        # otherwise rewrite it
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
            rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?_url=/$1 last;
            break;
        }
    }

    location ~ \.php {
        # try_files    $uri =404;

        fastcgi_index  /index.php;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_split_path_info       ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }

    location ~* ^/(css|img|js|flv|swf|download)/(.+)$ {
        root $root_path;
    }
}
}

It appears the Phalcon docs are wrong... or I am missing something... I will find out soon enough.

Replace _uri=/$1 for =$1 ... so far it works..

rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?_url=/$1 last;

rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?_url=$1 last;