Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 04/11/2011

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on a Debian Squeeze server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

2 Installing MySQL 5

First we install MySQL 5 like this:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

You will be asked to provide a password for the MySQL root user - this password is valid for the user root@localhost as well as root@server1.example.com, so we don't have to specify a MySQL root password manually later on:

New password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword
Repeat password for the MySQL "root" user: <-- yourrootsqlpassword

3 Installing Cherokee

Cherokee is available as a Debian package, therefore we can install it like this:

apt-get install cherokee

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see the Cherokee placeholder page:

Cherokee can be configured through a web-based control panel which we can start as follows:

cherokee-admin -b

(By default cherokee-admin binds only to 127.0.0.1 (localhost), which means you can only connect to it from the same system. With the -b parameter you can specify the network address to listen to. If no IP is provided, it will bind to all interfaces.)

Output should be similar to this one:

root@server1:~# cherokee-admin -b

Login:
  User:              admin
  One-time Password: 1Kkcc58atG8DNIM7

Web Interface:
  URL:               http://localhost:9090/

[11/04/2011 12:14:18.622] (error) rrd_tools.c:120 - Could not find the rrdtool binary.
Cherokee Web Server 1.0.8 (Jan 11 2011): Listening on port ALL:9090, TLS
disabled, IPv6 enabled, using epoll, 4096 fds system limit, max. 2041
connections, caching I/O, single thread

You need the username and password to log into the web interface which can be found on http://192.168.0.100:9090/:

This is how the web interface looks:

To stop cherokee-admin, type CTRL+C on the shell.

4 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in Cherokee through FastCGI. Fortunately, Debian provides a FastCGI-enabled PHP5 package which we install like this:

apt-get install php5-cgi

5 Configuring PHP5

We must modify /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini and uncomment the line cgi.fix_pathinfo=1:

vi /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini

[...]
; cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI.  PHP's
; previous behaviour was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not grok
; what PATH_INFO is.  For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specs.  Setting
; this to 1 will cause PHP CGI to fix its paths to conform to the spec.  A setting
; of zero causes PHP to behave as before.  Default is 1.  You should fix your scripts
; to use SCRIPT_FILENAME rather than PATH_TRANSLATED.
; http://php.net/cgi.fix-pathinfo
cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
[...]

Then we restart Cherokee:

/etc/init.d/cherokee restart