Running New Shopware Version 4.0.x On Nginx (LEMP) On Ubuntu 12.04

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Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 09/03/2012

This tutorial shows how you can install and run the new Shopware version 4.0.x on an Ubuntu 12.04 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). Shopware is a feature-rich ecommerce platform; I will use the Community Edition here which is free. nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I want to install Shopware in a vhost called www.example.com/example.com here with the document root /var/www/www.example.com/web.

You should have a working LEMP installation, as shown in this tutorial:

• Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 12.04

Because we must run all the steps from this tutorial with root privileges, we can either prepend all commands in this tutorial with the string sudo, or we become root right now by typing

sudo su

2 Installing Xcache And The ionCube Loader

Xcache is a free and open PHP opcode cacher for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. It's similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and APC. It is strongly recommended to have one of these installed to speed up your PHP page.

Xcache can be installed as follows:

apt-get install php5-xcache

Shopware 4 is available in different flavours - Community Version, Professional, Enterprise Business, and Enterprise Cluster. The free Community Version doesn't require that the ionCube Loader is installed while the other versions do. However, I recommend to install the ionCube Loader even if you use the Community Version because if you use a commercial Shopware plugin the ionCube Loader is required.

The ionCube Loader can be installed as follows:

cd /tmp

Next download and unpack the correct ionCube Loader package for your architecture (x86_64 or x86).

For x86_64:

wget http://downloads2.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz
tar xfvz ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz

For x86:

wget http://downloads2.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86.tar.gz
tar xfvz ioncube_loaders_lin_x86.tar.gz

Proceed as follows:

cp ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.3.so /usr/lib/php5/20090626/ioncube.so
vi /etc/php5/conf.d/ioncube.ini

zend_extension = /usr/lib/php5/20090626/ioncube.so

Reload PHP-FPM as follows:

/etc/init.d/php5-fpm reload

3 Configuring Nginx And PHP

The document root of my www.example.com web site is /var/www/www.example.com/web - if it doesn't exist, create it as follows:

mkdir -p /var/www/www.example.com/web

Create the folder /tmp/shopware where we will put the Shopware archive:

mkdir /tmp/shopware

Make sure unzip is installed:

apt-get install unzip

Download the Shopware package from http://wiki.shopware.de/Downloads_cat_448.html and put it in the /tmp/shopware directory:

cd /tmp/shopware
wget -O shopware4.zip http://files.shopware.de/download.php?package=install

Now uncompress Shopware and move it to your document root (/var/www/www.example.com/web):

unzip shopware4.zip
rm -f shopware4.zip
mv * .htaccess /var/www/www.example.com/web/

It is recommended to make the document root and the Shopware files in it writable by the nginx daemon which is running as user www-data and group www-data:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/www.example.com/web

If you haven't already created a MySQL database for Shopware (including a MySQL Shopware user), you can do that as follows (I name the database shopware in this example, and the user is called shopware_admin, and his password is shopware_admin_password):

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE shopware;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON shopware.* TO 'shopware_admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'shopware_admin_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON shopware.* TO 'shopware_admin'@'localhost.localdomain' IDENTIFIED BY 'shopware_admin_password';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

quit;

Because you can run your Shopware website under http and under https (that's totally up to you if you want to offer https, but recommended if your customers submit sensitive data such as credit card numbers, etc.), we need to add the following section to the http {} section in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (before the two include lines) which determines if the visitor uses http or https and sets the $fastcgi_https variable (which we will use in our www.example.com vhost) accordingly:

vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

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

        ##
        # Virtual Host Configs
        ##

        include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
        include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}
[...]

Next we create an nginx vhost configuration for our www.example.com vhost in the /etc/nginx/sites-available/ directory as follows:

vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.example.com.vhost

server {
       listen 80;

       ## SSL directives might go here
       ## see http://www.howtoforge.com/how_to_set_up_ssl_vhosts_under_nginx_plus_sni_support_ubuntu_11.04_debian_squeeze
       ## if you want to enable SSL for this vhost

       server_name www.example.com example.com;
       root /var/www/www.example.com/web;
       if ($http_host != "www.example.com") {
                 rewrite ^ http://www.example.com$request_uri permanent;
       }
       index index.php index.html;

       location = /favicon.ico {
                log_not_found off;
                access_log off;
       }
       location = /robots.txt {
                allow all;
                log_not_found off;
                access_log off;
       }

       location ~ /\. {
                deny all;
       }

       location ~ /(engine|files|templates|media/[a-z]+)/ {
       }

       location / {
                index index.html index.php shopware.php
                rewrite shopware.dll /shopware.php;
                rewrite files/documents/.* /engine last;
                rewrite images/ayww/(.*) /images/banner/$1 last;
                rewrite backend/media/(.*) media/$1 last;
                if (!-e $request_filename){
                    rewrite . /shopware.php last;
                }
       }

       location ~ \.(tpl|yml|ini)$ {
                deny all;
       }

       location /install {
                location /install/assets {
                }
                if (!-e $request_filename){
                    rewrite . /install/index.php last;
                }
       }

       location ~ \.php$ {
                try_files $uri =404;
                include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                fastcgi_param  HTTPS $fastcgi_https;
       }

}

See the comments in the above configuration if you want to enable https for the vhost. The procedure is described in this tutorial: How To Set Up SSL Vhosts Under Nginx + SNI Support (Ubuntu 11.04/Debian Squeeze)

To enable that vhost, we create a symlink to it from the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ directory:

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.example.com.vhost www.example.com.vhost

Reload nginx for the changes to take effect:

/etc/init.d/nginx reload

Next we must configure PHP to meets Shopware's requirements. I'm assuming you're using the default PHP-FPM pool /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf here. Open that file...

vi /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf

... and set the following PHP configuration at the end of the file:

[...]
php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 512M
php_admin_value[post_max_size] = 100M
php_admin_value[upload_max_filesize] = 100M
php_admin_value[max_execution_time] = 1200
php_admin_value[max_input_time] = 1200
php_admin_flag[magic_quotes_gpc] = off
php_admin_flag[file_uploads] = Yes
php_admin_value[max_file_uploads] = 20
php_admin_flag[phar.readonly] = off
php_admin_flag[session.auto_start] = off
php_admin_flag[suhosin.session.cryptua] = off
php_admin_flag[zend.ze1_compatibility_mode] = off

The numeric settings are just examples - for example, Shopware requires a memory limit of only 128MB, so you might want to set a lower value than 512MB. Equally, upload_max_filesize must be at least 10MB. The Shopware 4 installer will tell you if your PHP configuration doesn't match the Shopware 4 requirments.

Reload PHP-FPM:

/etc/init.d/php5-fpm reload

That's it for the server configuration.