Building CakePHP in sub-folder of localhost is a common way. If you use NGINX as web server for development, we need to setup several thing to make CakePHP works in sub-folder. For example, i have one CakePHP applications
localhost
|_ mycakephp
|_ app
|_ cake
|_ vendors
|_ plugins
|_ ...
So, i need to open my CakePHP apps from http://localhost/mycakephp. To make it’s works :
1. Edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
server {
listen 80; ## listen for ipv4; this line is default and implied
#listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
root /var/www;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
# Make site accessible from http://localhost/
server_name localhost;
# server_name_in_redirect off;
location / {
autoindex on;
# This is cool because no php is touched for static content
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
}
# rewrite rules for cakephp
location /mycakephp {
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/mycakephp(.+)$ /mycakephp/app/webroot/$1 last;
break;
}
}
location /mycakephp/app/webroot {
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/mycakephp/app/webroot/(.+)$ /mycakephp/app/webroot/index.php?url=$1 last;
break;
}
}
......
2. Restart NGINX services
3. Open your cakephp Applications.
4. Done 
I tried this method and all, but all the output of http://localhost/cakefolder gives me is “No input file specified”. I’m using CakePHP 2.1 and the latest nginx with PHP 5.3.3. My vhost conf looks like this:
location / {
root html;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
autoindex on;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
}
location /zooey {
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/zooey(.+)$ /zooey/app/webroot/$1 last;
break;
}
}
location /zooey/app/webroot {
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/zooey/app/webroot/(.+)$ /zooey/app/webroot/index.php?url=$1 last;
break;
}
}