Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 10

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
Last edited 12/08/2008

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 10 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 5.0

First we install MySQL 5.0 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

Now check that networking is enabled. Run

netstat -tap | grep mysql

It should show something like this:

[root@server1 ~]# netstat -tap | grep mysql
tcp        0      0 *:mysql                     *:*                         LISTEN      2407/mysqld
[root@server1 ~]#

If it does not, edit /etc/my.cnf and comment out the option skip-networking:

vi /etc/my.cnf

[...]
#skip-networking
[...]

and restart your MySQL server:

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

Run

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

to set a password for the user root (otherwise anybody can access your MySQL database!).

If the last command throws an error at you...

[root@server1 named]# mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword
mysqladmin: connect to server at 'server1.example.com' failed
error: 'Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)'
[root@server1 named]#

... we can set the password as follows: connect to MySQL:

mysql -u root -p

Type in the password for the MySQL root user. Then, on the MySQL shell, do this:

mysql> USE mysql;

mysql> UPDATE user SET Password = password('yourrootsqlpassword') WHERE Host = 'server1.example.com' AND User = 'root';

mysql> UPDATE user SET Password = password('yourrootsqlpassword') WHERE Host = '127.0.0.1' AND User = 'root';

Run

mysql> SELECT * FROM user;

to make sure that all rows where the user is root have a password.

If everything is looking ok, run

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

... and leave the MySQL shell:

mysql> quit;

3 Installing Nginx

Nginx is available as a package for Fedora 10 which we can install as follows:

yum install nginx

Then we create the system startup links for nginx and start it:

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

Type in your web server's IP address or hostname into a browser (e.g. http://192.168.0.100), and you should see the nginx welcome page: