Install And Configure Nginx, PHP, MySQL On Ubuntu

Nginx is simple webserver yet powerful. It is widely know for stable webserver. If it is well configured, nginx rarely have spike in the cpu load and have low memory consumption. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

In this article i want to share how to install and configure your Ubuntu server to use Nginx as web server, PHP5 support (using fastcgi) and MySQL support.

Install MySQL server

• Open your ssh terminal.
• Install MySQL:

  sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

Install and Configure Nginx

• Still in your ssh terminal.
• Update your repositories list

  sudo apt-get update

• Install nginx:

  sudo apt-get install nginx

• Nginx configuration file is under /etc/nginx/sites-available/default, and it should be change to:

  server {
      listen   80;
      server_name  localhost;
      access_log  /var/log/nginx/localhost.access.log;
  
  ## Default location
      location / {
          root   /var/www;
          index  index.php;
      }
  
  ## Images and static content is treated different
      location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|xml)$ {
        access_log        off;
        expires           30d;
        root /var/www;
      }
  
  ## Parse all .php file in the /var/www directory
      location ~ .php$ {
          fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(.*)$;
          fastcgi_pass   backend;
          fastcgi_index  index.php;
          fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
          include fastcgi_params;
          fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING     $query_string;
          fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD   $request_method;
          fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE     $content_type;
          fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH   $content_length;
          fastcgi_intercept_errors        on;
          fastcgi_ignore_client_abort     off;
          fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;
          fastcgi_send_timeout 180;
          fastcgi_read_timeout 180;
          fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
          fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;
          fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
          fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
      }
  
  ## Disable viewing .htaccess & .htpassword
      location ~ /.ht {
          deny  all;
      }
  }
  upstream backend {
          server 127.0.0.1:9000;
  }

Install and Configure PHP5 with Fastcgi

• Install spawn-fcgi with following command:

  sudo apt-get install spawn-fcgi

• Install PHP:

  sudo apt-get install php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-suhosin php5-cgi php-pear php5-mysql

• Now let’s write a script which will spawn FastCGI PHP processes on a unix domain socket. We create file create file /usr/sbin/fastcgi-php.

  sudo touch /usr/sbin/fastcgi-php

  then write this into the file:

  #!/bin/sh
  /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi

• To make it work at startup we need now to create an init script:

  sudo  touch /etc/init.d/init-fastcgi

  Then write the following:

  #!/bin/bash
  PHP_SCRIPT=/usr/bin/php-fastcgi
  RETVAL=0
  case "$1" in
      start)
        $PHP_SCRIPT
        RETVAL=$?
    ;;
      stop)
        killall -9 php
        RETVAL=$?
    ;;
      restart)
        killall -9 php
        $PHP_SCRIPT
        RETVAL=$?
    ;;
      *)
        echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
        exit 1
    ;;
  esac
  exit $RETVAL

  Give the script execute permission:

  sudo  chmod 755 /etc/init.d/init-fastcgi
  #then run it
  /etc/init.d/init-fastcgi start

  Now let’s start it on boot:

  sudo  update-rc.d init-fastcgi defaults

• Restart Nginx:

  sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

• Test it with phpinfo(). If you see the result now everything is okay, but if you don’t please revise the steps you have done.

PS: this steps work for me on my machine with Ubuntu 10.04 server edition. I’m not guarantee that this will work for you too, but that’s the basic to install Nginx, PHP, MySQL On Ubuntu. If you are not successful maybe you just need to check the configuration to get it working. I cannot get it run in first try. So keep trying, it’s a learning process.

Related article:
[HowTo] Install Apache, PHP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin on Ubuntu