4 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in nginx through FastCGI. Therefore we install php5-fastcgi and the standalone FastCGI daemon package spawn-fcgi:

yast2 -i php5-fastcgi spawn-fcgi

To get MySQL support in PHP, we can install the php5-mysql package. It's a good idea to install some other PHP5 modules as well as you might need them for your applications:

yast2 -i php5-mysql php5-bcmath php5-bz2 php5-calendar php5-ctype php5-curl php5-dom php5-ftp php5-gd php5-gettext php5-gmp php5-iconv php5-imap php5-ldap php5-mbstring php5-mcrypt php5-odbc php5-openssl php5-pcntl php5-pgsql php5-posix php5-shmop php5-snmp php5-soap php5-sockets php5-sqlite php5-sysvsem php5-tokenizer php5-wddx php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-zlib php5-exif php5-pear php5-sysvmsg php5-sysvshm

Then open /etc/php5/fastcgi/php.ini and uncomment the line cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 somewhere in the middle of the file:

vi /etc/php5/fastcgi/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
[...]

The lighttpd-fastcgi package comes with the executable /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi which we can use to start FastCGI processes. Take a look at

spawn-fcgi --help

to learn more about it.

To start a PHP FastCGI daemon listening on port 9000 on localhost and running as the user and group nginx, we run the following command:

/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u nginx -g nginx -f /usr/bin/php-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid

Of course, you don't want to type in that command manually whenever you boot the system, so to have the system execute the command automatically at boot time, open /etc/init.d/boot.local...

vi /etc/init.d/boot.local

... and add the command at the end of the file:

[...]
/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u nginx -g nginx -f /usr/bin/php-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid

5 Configuring nginx

The nginx configuration is in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf which we open now:

vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

The configuration is easy to understand (you can learn more about it here: http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxFullExample and here: http://wiki.codemongers.com/NginxFullExample2)

First (this is optional) you can increase the number of worker processes and set the keepalive_timeout to a reasonable value:

[...]
worker_processes  5;
[...]
    keepalive_timeout  2;
[...]

The virtual hosts are defined in server {} containers. Let's modify the default vhost as follows:

[...]
    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  _;
        #charset koi8-r;
        #access_log  /var/log/nginx/host.access.log  main;
        location / {
            root   /srv/www/htdocs;
            index  index.php index.html index.htm;
        }
        #error_page  404              /404.html;
        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /srv/www/htdocs;
        }
        # proxy the PHP scripts to Apache listening on 127.0.0.1:80
        #
        #location ~ \.php$ {
        #    proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1;
        #}
        # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
        #
        location ~ \.php$ {
            root           /srv/www/htdocs;
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /srv/www/htdocs$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }
        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
            deny  all;
        }
    }
[...]

server_name _; makes this a default catchall vhost (of course, you can as well specify a hostname here like www.example.com).

In the location / part, I've added index.php to the index line. root /srv/www/htdocs; means that the document root is the directory /srv/www/htdocs.

The important part for PHP is the location ~ \.php$ {} stanza. Uncomment it to enable it. Change the root line to the web site's dosument root (e.g. root /srv/www/htdocs;). Please make sure that you change the fastcgi_param line to fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /srv/www/htdocs$fastcgi_script_name; because otherwise the PHP interpreter won't find the PHP script that you call in your browser.

Now save the file and restart nginx:

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Now create the following PHP file in the document root /srv/www/htdocs...

vi /srv/www/htdocs/info.php

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Now we call that file in a browser (e.g. http://192.168.0.100/info.php):

As you see, PHP5 is working, and it's working through FastCGI, as shown in the Server API line. If you scroll further down, you will see all modules that are already enabled in PHP5, including the MySQL module:

6 Links

• nginx: http://nginx.net/
• nginx Wiki: http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main
• PHP: http://www.php.net/
• MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/
• OpenSUSE: http://www.opensuse.org/