Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 11

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 09/04/2009

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 Fedora 11 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:

yum install mysql mysql-server

Then we create the system startup links for MySQL (so that MySQL starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start the MySQL server:

chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Create a password for the MySQL user root (replace yourrootsqlpassword with the password you want to use):

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootsqlpassword
mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

3 Installing Cherokee

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

yum install cherokee

Next we create the system startup links for Cherokee and start it:

chkconfig --levels 235 cherokee on
/etc/init.d/cherokee start

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: WvU7xFiSLH5748AQ

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

Cherokee Web Server 0.99.17 (Jun 14 2009): Listening on port ALL:9090, TLS
disabled, IPv6 disabled, using epoll, 1024 fds system limit, max. 505
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. Therefore we install the package php-cli:

yum install php-cli

5 Configuring PHP5

We must modify /etc/php.ini and add the line cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 right at the end of the file:

vi /etc/php.ini

[...]
cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

Then we restart Cherokee:

/etc/init.d/cherokee restart