4 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in nginx through PHP-FPM (PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites). There's no php-fpm package in the official Fedora 14 repositories, but fortunately the Remi repository provides such a package.

To enable the Remi repository, run:

rpm -ivh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-release-14.rpm

Next open /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo...

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo

... and change enabled to 1 and gpgcheck to 0 in the [remi] section (don't enable the [remi-test] section!):

[remi]
name=Les RPM de remi pour Fedora $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/fedora/$releasever/remi/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/fedora/$releasever/remi/mirror
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
failovermethod=priority
[remi-test]
name=Les RPM de remi en test pour Fedora $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/fedora/$releasever/test/$basearch/
mirrorlist=http://rpms.famillecollet.com/fedora/$releasever/test/mirror
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
failovermethod=priority

Now we can install php-fpm together with php-cli and some PHP5 modules like php-mysql which you need if you want to use MySQL from your PHP scripts:

yum install php-fpm php-cli php-mysql php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-eaccelerator php-magickwand php-magpierss php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mssql php-shout php-snmp php-soap php-tidy

Then open /etc/php.ini and uncomment the line cgi.fix_pathinfo=1:

vi /etc/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://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.cgi.fix-pathinfo
cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
[...]

Next create the system startup links for php-fpm and start it:

chkconfig --levels 235 php-fpm on
/etc/init.d/php-fpm start

PHP-FPM is a daemon process (with the init script /etc/init.d/php-fpm) that runs a FastCGI server on port 9000.

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  logs/host.access.log  main;
        location / {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
            index  index.php index.html index.htm;
        }
        error_page  404              /404.html;
        location = /404.html {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        }
        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        }
        # 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           /usr/share/nginx/html;
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /usr/share/nginx/html$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 /usr/share/nginx/html; means that the document root is the directory /usr/share/nginx/html.

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 /usr/share/nginx/html;). Please make sure that you change the fastcgi_param line to fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/share/nginx/html$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 /usr/share/nginx/html...

vi /usr/share/nginx/html/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 FPM/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/
• PHP-FPM: http://php-fpm.org/
• MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/
• Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/

About The Author

Falko Timme is the owner of Timme Hosting (ultra-fast nginx web hosting). He is the lead maintainer of HowtoForge (since 2005) and one of the core developers of ISPConfig (since 2000). He has also contributed to the O'Reilly book "Linux System Administration".