5 Configuring Lighttpd And PHP5

To enable PHP5 in Lighttpd, we must modify two files, /etc/php.ini and /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. First we open /etc/php.ini and set cgi.fix_pathinfo to 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 it's 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.
cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
[...]

Then we open /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf and uncomment "mod_fastcgi", in the server.modules stanza:

vi /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

[...]
server.modules              = (
#                               "mod_rewrite",
#                               "mod_redirect",
#                               "mod_alias",
                                "mod_access",
#                               "mod_cml",
#                               "mod_trigger_b4_dl",
#                               "mod_auth",
#                               "mod_status",
#                               "mod_setenv",
                                "mod_fastcgi",
#                               "mod_proxy",
#                               "mod_simple_vhost",
#                               "mod_evhost",
#                               "mod_userdir",
#                               "mod_cgi",
#                               "mod_compress",
#                               "mod_ssi",
#                               "mod_usertrack",
#                               "mod_expire",
#                               "mod_secdownload",
#                               "mod_rrdtool",
                                "mod_accesslog" )
[...]

and then, further down the file, there's a fastcgi.server stanza which we uncomment as well; furthermore we modify the bin-path line as follows:

[...]
#### fastcgi module
## read fastcgi.txt for more info
## for PHP don't forget to set cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 in the php.ini
fastcgi.server             = ( ".php" =>
                               ( "localhost" =>
                                 (
                                   "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket",
                                   "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-fcgi"
                                 )
                               )
                            )
[...]

The socket line has the value /var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket, but the directory /var/run/lighttpd doesn't exist yet, therefore we create it now:

mkdir /var/run/lighttpd

Then we restart Lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

6 Testing PHP5 / Getting Details About Your PHP5 Installation

The document root of the default web site is /var/www/html. We will now create a small PHP file (info.php) in that directory and call it in a browser. The file will display lots of useful details about our PHP installation, such as the installed PHP version.

vi /var/www/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 FastCGI, as shown in the Server API line. If you scroll further down, you will see all modules that are already enabled in PHP5. MySQL is not listed there which means we don't have MySQL support in PHP5 yet.

7 Getting MySQL Support In PHP5

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

urpmi --fuzzy php

Pick the ones you need and install them like this:

urpmi php-mysql php-mysqli php-bz2 php-calendar php-ctype php-curl php-devel php-dio php-dom php-eaccelerator php-enchant php-esmtp php-event php-exif php-fam php-ffmpeg php-fileinfo php-filepro php-ftp php-gd php-gettext php-gmp php-iconv php-id3 php-idn php-imap php-imlib2 php-mailparse php-mbstring php-mcache php-mcrypt php-mhash php-ming php-ncurses php-newt php-odbc php-oggvorbis php-pam_auth php-pcntl php-pcre php-pear-Net_IDNA php-posix php-pspell php-readline php-recode php-session php-shmop php-simplexml php-snmp php-soap php-sockets php-sqlite php-ssh2 php-suhosin php-sysvmsg php-sysvsem php-sysvshm php-tclink php-tcpwrap php-tidy php-xml php-xmlrpc php-zip php-ini

Now restart Lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Now reload http://192.168.0.100/info.php in your browser and scroll down to the modules section again. You should now find lots of new modules there, including the MySQL module:

8 Links

• Lighttpd: http://www.lighttpd.net
• PHP: http://www.php.net
• MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
• Mandriva: http://www.mandriva.com