11 Install Dovecot

Dovecot can be installed as follows:

yum install dovecot dovecot-mysql

Now create the system startup links and start Dovecot:

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

12 Install Postfix

Postfix can be installed as follows:

yum install postfix

Then turn off Sendmail and start Postfix:

chkconfig --levels 235 sendmail off
chkconfig --levels 235 postfix on
/etc/init.d/sendmail stop
/etc/init.d/postfix restart

13 Install Getmail

Getmail can be installed as follows:

yum install getmail

14 Install Amavisd-new, SpamAssassin, And ClamAV

To install amavisd-new, spamassassin and clamav, run the following command:

yum install amavisd-new spamassassin clamav clamd unzip bzip2 unrar perl-DBD-mysql

Then we start freshclam, amavisd, and clamd.amavisd:

sa-update
chkconfig --levels 235 amavisd on
chkconfig --del clamd
chkconfig --levels 235 clamd.amavisd on
/usr/bin/freshclam
/etc/init.d/amavisd start
/etc/init.d/clamd.amavisd start

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

Nginx is available as a package for CentOS 6.3 (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-pecl-apc 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):

[...]
;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 6.3, 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).