15 Install Nginx, PHP5 (PHP-FPM), And Fcgiwrap

Nginx is available as a package for CentOS 6.1 (from EPEL) which we can install as follows:

yum install nginx

If Apache2 is already installed on the system, stop it now...

/etc/init.d/httpd stop

... and remove Apache's system startup links:

chkconfig --del httpd

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

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

(If both Apache2 and nginx are installed, the ISPConfig 3 installer will ask you which one you want to use - answer nginx in this case. If only one of these both is installed, ISPConfig will do the necessary configuration automatically.)

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). 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 as follows:

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

Next we open /etc/php.ini...

vi /etc/php.ini

... and change the error reporting (so that notices aren't shown any longer) and uncomment cgi.fix_pathinfo=1:

[...]
;error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
[...]

Also set cgi.fix_pathinfo=0:

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=0
[...]

(Please read http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls to find out why you should do this.)

In addition to that, in order to avoid errors like

[08-Aug-2011 18:07:08] PHP Warning: phpinfo(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Europe/Berlin' for 'CEST/2.0/DST' instead in /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php on line 2

... in /var/log/php-fpm/www-error.log when you call a PHP script in your browser, you should set date.timezone in /etc/php.ini:

[...]
[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://www.php.net/manual/en/datetime.configuration.php#ini.date.timezone
date.timezone = "Europe/Berlin"
[...]

You can find out the correct timezone for your system by running:

cat /etc/sysconfig/clock

[root@server1 tmp]# cat /etc/sysconfig/clock
ZONE="Europe/Berlin"
[root@server1 tmp]#

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.

To get CGI support in nginx, we install Fcgiwrap.

Fcgiwrap is a CGI wrapper that should work also for complex CGI scripts and can be used for shared hosting environments because it allows each vhost to use its own cgi-bin directory.

As there's no fcgiwrap package for CentOS 6.1, we must build it ourselves. First we install some prerequisites:

yum install fcgi-devel

Now we can build fcgiwrap as follows:

cd /usr/local/src/
git clone git://github.com/gnosek/fcgiwrap.git
cd fcgiwrap
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make install

This installs fcgiwrap to /usr/local/sbin/fcgiwrap.

Next we install the spawn-fcgi package which allows us to run fcgiwrap as a daemon:

yum install spawn-fcgi

Open /etc/sysconfig/spawn-fcgi...

vi /etc/sysconfig/spawn-fcgi

... and modify the file as follows:

# You must set some working options before the "spawn-fcgi" service will work.
# If SOCKET points to a file, then this file is cleaned up by the init script.
#
# See spawn-fcgi(1) for all possible options.
#
# Example :
#SOCKET=/var/run/php-fcgi.sock
#OPTIONS="-u apache -g apache -s $SOCKET -S -M 0600 -C 32 -F 1 -P /var/run/spawn-fcgi.pid -- /usr/bin/php-cgi"
FCGI_SOCKET=/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket
FCGI_PROGRAM=/usr/local/sbin/fcgiwrap
FCGI_USER=apache
FCGI_GROUP=apache
FCGI_EXTRA_OPTIONS="-M 0770"
OPTIONS="-u $FCGI_USER -g $FCGI_GROUP -s $FCGI_SOCKET -S $FCGI_EXTRA_OPTIONS -F 1 -P /var/run/spawn-fcgi.pid -- $FCGI_PROGRAM"

Now add the user nginx to the group apache:

usermod -a -G apache nginx

Create the system startup links for spawn-fcgi...

chkconfig --levels 235 spawn-fcgi on

... and start it as follows:

/etc/init.d/spawn-fcgi start

You should now find the fcgiwrap socket in/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket, owned by the user and group apache (some scripts, e.g. Mailman, expect to be run by the user/group apache, that's why we don't run spawn-fcgi as user/group nginx, but instead add nginx to the apache group).

16 Install phpMyAdmin

Next we install phpMyAdmin:

yum install phpmyadmin

Next we change the authentication in phpMyAdmin from cookie to http:

vi /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

[...]
/* Authentication type */
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'http';
[...]

You can now find phpMyAdmin in the /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ directory.

After you have installed ISPConfig 3, you can access phpMyAdmin as follows:

The ISPConfig apps vhost on port 8081 for nginx comes with a phpMyAdmin configuration, so you can use http://server1.example.com:8081/phpmyadmin or http://server1.example.com:8081/phpMyAdmin to access phpMyAdmin.

If you want to use a /phpmyadmin or /phpMyAdmin alias that you can use from your web sites, this is a bit more complicated than for Apache because nginx does not have global aliases (i.e., aliases that can be defined for all vhosts). Therefore you have to define these aliases for each vhost from which you want to access phpMyAdmin.

To do this, paste the following into the nginx Directives field on the Options tab of the web site in ISPConfig:

        location /phpmyadmin {
               root /usr/share/;
               index index.php index.html index.htm;
               location ~ ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.php)$ {
                       try_files $uri =404;
                       root /usr/share/;
                       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                       fastcgi_index index.php;
                       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                       include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                       fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
                       fastcgi_buffers 256 4k;
                       fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
                       fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
                       fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
               }
               location ~* ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html|xml|txt))$ {
                       root /usr/share/;
               }
        }
        location /phpMyAdmin {
               rewrite ^/* /phpmyadmin last;
        }

If you use https instead of http for your vhost, you should add the line fastcgi_param HTTPS on; to your phpMyAdmin configuration like this:

        location /phpmyadmin {
               root /usr/share/;
               index index.php index.html index.htm;
               location ~ ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.php)$ {
                       try_files $uri =404;
                       root /usr/share/;
                       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                       fastcgi_param HTTPS on; # <-- add this line
                       fastcgi_index index.php;
                       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                       include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                       fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
                       fastcgi_buffers 256 4k;
                       fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
                       fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
                       fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
               }
               location ~* ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html|xml|txt))$ {
                       root /usr/share/;
               }
        }
        location /phpMyAdmin {
               rewrite ^/* /phpmyadmin last;
        }

If you use both http and https for your vhost, you need to add the following section to the http {} section in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (before any include lines) which determines if the visitor uses http or https and sets the $fastcgi_https variable (which we will use in our phpMyAdmin configuration) accordingly:

vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

[...]
http {
[...]
    ## Detect when HTTPS is used
    map $scheme $fastcgi_https {
      default off;
      https on;
    }
[...]
}
[...]

Don't forget to reload nginx afterwards:

/etc/init.d/nginx reload

Then go to the nginx Directives field again, and instead of fastcgi_param HTTPS on; you add the line fastcgi_param HTTPS $fastcgi_https; so that you can use phpMyAdmin for both http and https requests:

        location /phpmyadmin {
               root /usr/share/;
               index index.php index.html index.htm;
               location ~ ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.php)$ {
                       try_files $uri =404;
                       root /usr/share/;
                       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                       fastcgi_param HTTPS $fastcgi_https; # <-- add this line
                       fastcgi_index index.php;
                       fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                       include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                       fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
                       fastcgi_buffers 256 4k;
                       fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
                       fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
                       fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
               }
               location ~* ^/phpmyadmin/(.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|html|xml|txt))$ {
                       root /usr/share/;
               }
        }
        location /phpMyAdmin {
               rewrite ^/* /phpmyadmin last;
        }

17 Install Mailman

Since version 3.0.4, ISPConfig also allows you to manage (create/modify/delete) Mailman mailing lists. If you want to make use of this feature, install Mailman as follows:

yum install mailman

Before we can start Mailman, a first mailing list called mailman must be created:

/usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist mailman

[root@server1 tmp]# /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist mailman
Enter the email of the person running the list: <-- admin email address, e.g. info@example.com
Initial mailman password: <-- admin password for the mailman list
To finish creating your mailing list, you must edit your /etc/aliases (or
equivalent) file by adding the following lines, and possibly running the
`newaliases' program:

## mailman mailing list
mailman:              "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman"
mailman-admin:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin mailman"
mailman-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces mailman"
mailman-confirm:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm mailman"
mailman-join:         "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join mailman"
mailman-leave:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave mailman"
mailman-owner:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner mailman"
mailman-request:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request mailman"
mailman-subscribe:    "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe mailman"
mailman-unsubscribe:  "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe mailman"

Hit enter to notify mailman owner... <-- ENTER

[root@server1 tmp]#

Open /etc/aliases afterwards...

vi /etc/aliases

... and add the following lines:

[...]
mailman:              "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman"
mailman-admin:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin mailman"
mailman-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces mailman"
mailman-confirm:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm mailman"
mailman-join:         "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join mailman"
mailman-leave:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave mailman"
mailman-owner:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner mailman"
mailman-request:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request mailman"
mailman-subscribe:    "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe mailman"
mailman-unsubscribe:  "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe mailman"

Run

newaliases

afterwards and restart Postfix:

/etc/init.d/postfix restart

Create the system startup links for Mailman and start it:

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

Now we need to create this symlink to make Mailman work with ISPConfig:

cd /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/
ln -s ./ mailman

If you want to use Mailman from your web sites created through ISPConfig, this is a bit more complicated than for Apache because nginx does not have global aliases (i.e., aliases that can be defined for all vhosts). Therefore you have to define these aliases for each vhost from which you want to access Mailman.

To do this, paste the following into the nginx Directives field on the Options tab of the web site in ISPConfig:

        location /cgi-bin/mailman {
               alias /usr/lib/mailman/cgi-bin;
               fastcgi_split_path_info (^/cgi-bin/mailman/[^/]*)(.*)$;
               include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
               fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/mailman$fastcgi_script_name;
               fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
               fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED /usr/lib/mailman$fastcgi_path_info;
               fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
               fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
        }
        location /images/mailman {
               alias /usr/lib/mailman/icons;
        }
        location /pipermail {
               alias /var/lib/mailman/archives/public;
               autoindex on;
        }

This defines the alias /cgi-bin/mailman/ for your vhost, which means you can access the Mailman admin interface for a list at http://<vhost>/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/<listname>, and the web page for users of a mailing list can be found at http://<vhost>/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/<listname>.

Under http://<vhost>/pipermail you can find the mailing list archives.