Nginx Installation and Configuration

Based on

• http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1025286 = for debian 6
• http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-nginx-with-php5-and-mysql-support-on-debian-lenny
• http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-php-5.3-nginx-and-php-fpm-on-ubuntu-debian
• Very helpful for mediawiki: http://blog.bigdinosaur.org/mediawiki-on-nginx/
• Interesting and authoritative, but covers only single mediawiki in root, not clear how to modify: http://wiki.nginx.org/MediaWiki
• Mediawiki, very useful mediawiki-config-generator: http://shorturls.redwerks.org/
• Highly recommended: http://www.nginx-discovery.com/2011/04/day-45-location-regexp-or-no-regexp.html
• nginx behaves differently with respect to output flushing than apache, perhaps a solution here: http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2011/01/24/php-nginx-and-output-flushing/

Installation:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

add lines:

# necessary only for php-fpm, the php version for nginx:
deb http://packages.dotdeb.org stable all

Add the GnuPG key to your distribution:

wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
cat dotdeb.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
rm dotdeb.gpg

Install nginx, fpm, new php:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5 php5-fpm php-pear php5-common php5-mcrypt php5-mysql php5-cli php5-gd php5-curl php5-dev php5-imagick php5-imap php5-intl php5-pspell php5-recode php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5-apc
sudo apt-get install nginx

Apply "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini (security, avoid loading undesired php in a subfolder).

Change php-fpm configuration with:

sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf

and

sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

setting:

pm.max_children = 25
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 10
pm.max_requests = 1500
request_terminate_timeout = 450s

Change nginx configuration with:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

adding various settings.

edit the default vhost config:

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled; nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

(To create symlinks for further vhost files like "www.example.com" under sites-enabled:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/www.example.com

)

NOTE: One failure we experienced was that we tested php with the phpinfo.php file, which, however, uses short php open tags. The default FPM-based php.ini in /etc/php5/fpm has short_open_tag = Off however. This initially and wrongly lead us to the conclusion that php was not working.

NOTE: for testing we used port 8880, which goes through bgbm (but not jki) firewalls.

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Restart apache, nginx and fpm (we still use apache for certain uses):

sudo /usr/sbin/apache2ctl -k graceful && sudo service nginx restart && sudo service php5-fpm restart

STOP:

sudo /etc/init.d/php5-fpm stop; sudo /etc/init.d/nginx stop