Nginx PHP-FastCGI on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

To build a perfect LNMP with those packages: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Nginx, MySQL, Php5

The nginx web server is a fast, lightweight server designed to efficiently handle the needs of both low and high traffic websites. Although commonly used to serve static content, it's quite capable of handling dynamic pages as well. This guide will help you get nginx up and running with PHP and FastCGI on your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid) Linux VPS.

We assume you've already followed the steps outlined in our . These steps should be performed via a root login to your Linode VPS over SSH.

These instructions work with the Linode platform. If you don't have a Linode yet, sign up for a  and get started today.

Contents

Install Required Packages 

Issue the following commands to update your system and install the nginx web server, PHP, and MySQL Server packages:

# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# apt-get install nginx php5-cli php5-cgi spawn-fcgi php5-mysql mysql-server
# echo "console output" >> /etc/init.d/nginx
# update-rc.d nginx defaults
# /etc/init.d/nginx start

Various additional dependency packages will be installed along with the ones we requested, and will ask you to input password for the root user of Mysql. Once the installation process finishes, you may wish to make sure nginx is running by browsing to your IP address, take this for example: You should get the default ngnix page.

Configure Your Site 

In this guide, we'll be using the domain "bambookites.com" as our example site. You should substitute your own domain name in the configuration steps that follow. First, we'll need to create directories to hold our content and log files:

# mkdir -p /var/www/dajiamaicom 
# cat > /var/www/dajiamaicom/index.php <




Welcome to nginx!




EOF
# chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/dajiamaicom

Next, we'll need to define our site's virtual host file:

File: /etc/nginx/sites-available/dajiamai.com

# cat > /etc/nginx/sites-availabe/dajiamai.com <
server {
    listen   80;
    server_name  dajiamai.com;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/dajiamaicom.error.log;
   
    location / {
        root   /var/www/dajiamaicom;
        index  index.html index.htm index.php;
    }
   
    location ~ \.php$ {
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index index.php index.html;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/dajiamaicom$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}
EOF

Issue the following commands to enable the site:

# cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
# ln -sv ../sites-available/dajiamai.com ./
# /etc/init.d/nginx restart

You may wish to create a test HTML page under /var/www/dajiamaicom/ and view it in your browser to verify that nginx is properly serving your site (PHP will not work yet). Please note that this will require an  pointing your domain name to your IP address.At windows, you could edit the file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, append below line to serve as DNS temporarily:

192.168.105.105

NOTICE: you should replace 192.168.105.105 with your Ubuntu 10.04 host's real IP address,and then you can browse to test the new website.

Configure spawn-fcgi 

Create a wrapper script for spawn-fcgi:

File: /usr/sbin/php-fastcgi

# cat > /usr/sbin/php-fastcgi << EOF
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -C 6 -u www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi
EOF

Make the script executable with the following command:

chmod a+x /usr/sbin/php-fastcgi

Create an init script for fast-cgi:
File: /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi

# cat > /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi << EOF
#!/bin/bash
PHP_SCRIPT=/usr/bin/php-fastcgi
FASTCGI_USER=www-data
RETVAL=0
case "$1" in
    start)
      su - $FASTCGI_USER -c $PHP_SCRIPT
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    stop)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    restart)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      su - $FASTCGI_USER -c $PHP_SCRIPT
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    *)
      echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
      exit 1
  ;;
esac      
exit $RETVAL
console output
EOF

Issue the following commands to make the init script run at startup and launch it for the first time:

# chmod 755 /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
# update-rc.d php-fastcgi defaults
# /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start

change the default character_set of MySQL, just to add below line in [client] and [mysqld] sections :

default-character-set=utf8

reboot mysql server :

# /etc/init.d/mysql restart

Issue the following commands to make sure the needed ports to be listen:

# netstat -tnlp
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:3306          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      463/mysqld
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      476/nginx
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:9000          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      488/php5-cgi

More Information 

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• 
• 
• PHP Documentation

License 

This guide is licensed under a . Please feel free to redistribute unmodified copies of it as long as attribution is provided, preferably via a link to this page.