Setting up PHP With Nginx

2011-08-25 PHP Nginx

This is a small tutorial on how to setup PHP with Nginx.

Install php-fpm

Installing php-fpm should be simple for the most part just using yum

$ yum install php-fpm

However you may get dependency issues depending on your flavor of UNIX, or hosting provider like in my case. You can add a repository with the necessary dependency's like so. First create a file called russia-repo.repo

$ cd /etc/yum.repos.d
$ vi russia-repo.repo

Add the following into the file:

[russia-repo]
name=CentOS-$releasever  rusia packages for $basearch
baseurl=http://centos.alt.ru/pub/repository/centos/5/i386/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
protect=1

You should now be able to install php-fpm using yum with the proper dependencies.

Configure php-fpm

This is a small step that seemed to be overlooked on all the tutorials I saw, probably because they weren't dealing with sessions. We need to set the user in the php-fpm.conf file and tell it what user to run processes as.

$ vi /etc/php-fpm.conf

Look for a few lines that look like this:

Unix user of processes
<value name="user">nobody</value>

Unix group of processes
<value name="group">nobody</value>

Change the user and group values to nginx (assuming you are using with nginx) so that it looks like this:

Unix user of processes
<value name="user">nginx</value>

Unix group of processes
<value name="group">nginx</value>

Setup Proper Permissions

If you plan on using session, then you will have to set the proper permission on the PHP session folder.

$ ls -la /var/lib/php
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root       4096 Jan  7  2011 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 root root       4096 Aug  8 13:23 ..
drwxrwx---  2 root apache 143360 Aug  9 22:04 session

You will probably see Apache there if you already have that installed, if not just set it to Nginx or a group that has the Nginx user in it. Remember our php-fpm processes are now running as Nginx user, so that is the user that needs permissions.

$ chown root:nginx /var/lib/php/session

Configure Nginx Virtual Host

Now we have to tell Nginx to redirect PHP request to php-fpm, so we'll edit our virtual.conf file

$ vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf

Add the following to your server directive, something like the following:

server {
        listen               80;
        listen               duchnik.com:80;
        server_name     duchnik.com www.duchnik.com;
        root                 /home/webadmin/www.duchnik.com/htdocs;
        index                index.html index.htm index.php;

        location ~ \.php$ {
                root /home/webadmin/www.duchnik.com/htdocs;

                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf;
        }
}

Restart Nginx and php-fpm

Now just restart Nginx and php-fpm and you should be good to go with PHP in Nginx.

$ service nginx restart
$ service php-fpm restart

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