Running OXID eShop Community Edition (Version 4.5.9) On Nginx (LEMP) on Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

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Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 04/23/2012

This tutorial shows how you can install and run OXID eShop Community Edition (version 4.5.9) on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). OXID eShop is a feature-rich ecommerce platform; I will use the Community Edition here which is licensed under an open source certified license (GPL v3.0). 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 OXID eShop 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 these tutorials:

• Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze
• Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10

A note for Ubuntu users:

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 APC

APC 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 XCache. It is strongly recommended to have one of these installed to speed up your PHP page.

APC can be installed as follows:

apt-get install php-apc

If you use PHP-FPM as your FastCGI daemon (like in Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10), restart it as follows:

/etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart

If you use lighttpd's spawn-fcgi program as your FastCGI daemon (like in Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze), we must kill the current spawn-fcgi process (running on port 9000) and create a new one. Run

netstat -tap

to find out the PID of the current spawn-fcgi process:

root@server1:~# netstat -tap
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 *:sunrpc                *:*                     LISTEN      734/portmap
tcp        0      0 *:www                   *:*                     LISTEN      2987/nginx
tcp        0      0 *:ssh                   *:*                     LISTEN      1531/sshd
tcp        0      0 *:57174                 *:*                     LISTEN      748/rpc.statd
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:smtp *:*                     LISTEN      1507/exim4
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:9000 *:*                     LISTEN      1542/php5-cgi
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdo:mysql *:*                     LISTEN      1168/mysqld
tcp        0     52 server1.example.com:ssh 192.168.0.198:2462      ESTABLISHED 1557/0
tcp6       0      0 [::]:www                [::]:*                  LISTEN      2987/nginx
tcp6       0      0 [::]:ssh                [::]:*                  LISTEN      1531/sshd
tcp6       0      0 ip6-localhost:smtp      [::]:*                  LISTEN      1507/exim4
root@server1:~#

In the above output, the PID is 1542, so we can kill the current process as follows:

kill -9 1542

Afterwards we create a new spawn-fcgi process:

/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -g www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid

3 Installing OXID eShop

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/oxid where we will put the OXID eShop archive:

mkdir /tmp/oxid

Next download OXID eShop Community Edition from http://www.oxid-esales.com/de/download/open-source-software-oxid-eshop-community-edition to your client PC and upload it from there to /tmp/oxid (e.g. with WinSCP).

Make sure unzip is installed:

apt-get install unzip

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

cd /tmp/oxid
unzip OXID_ESHOP_CE_4.5.9_*.zip
rm -f OXID_ESHOP_CE_4.5.9_*.zip
mv * .htaccess /var/www/www.example.com/web/

It is recommended to make the document root and the OXID eShop 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 OXID eShop (including a MySQL OXID eShop user), you can do that as follows (I name the database oxid in this example, and the user is called oxid_admin, and his password is oxid_admin_password):

mysql -u root -p

CREATE DATABASE oxid;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON oxid.* TO 'oxid_admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'oxid_admin_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON oxid.* TO 'oxid_admin'@'localhost.localdomain' IDENTIFIED BY 'oxid_admin_password';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

quit;

Because you can run your OXID eShop 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;

       if ($request_method ~ ^(TRACE|TRACK)$ ) {
                return 403;
       }

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

       location ~ (/\.|EXCEPTION_LOG\.txt|\.log$|\.tpl$|pkg.rev) {
                deny all;
       }

       location ~ /out/pictures/.*(\.jpg|\.gif|\.png)$ {
                try_files $uri /core/utils/getimg.php;
       }

       location ~ ^/(admin|setup)/?$ {
       }

       location ~ /(core|export|modules|out|tmp|views)/ {
       }

       location / {
                try_files $uri $uri/ /oxseo.php;
       }

       location = /oxseo.php {
                if ($args ~ "mod_rewrite_module_is=off") {
                       rewrite /oxseo.php /oxseo.php?mod_rewrite_module_is=on? break;
                }
                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;
       }

       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