Installing PHP 5.3, Nginx And PHP-fpm On Ubuntu/Debian

Since Apache is most of the time a memory hungy process, people started to look for different ways to host their website. Apache is clearly not the only webserver available. A few good examples are lighttpd and nginx. In this tutorial I will show you how to install it on your Ubuntu server. This tutorial also applies to Debian, though. There is only a very small difference.

Ready? Let's begin shall we.

Step 0 - Preliminary Notes

In order to complete this tutorial, I assume you have installed a base system of Debian or Ubuntu. How this can be done, can be read in different tutorials. This tutorial only focusses on getting nginx+php running without much hassle.

Step 1 - Nginx

Installing nginx is the first step we have to do. This can be easily done by downloading it from the repository.

sudo apt-get install nginx

The default vhost has to be changed in order to work properly.

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

A nice starting point for your config is:

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$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
        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;
}

Ok, we're done here. Now we'll install the needed files for PHP.

Step 2 - Installing PHP

Many sites rely on PHP for providing them dynamic content, whether this is a wiki, forum software, weblog or something entirely different.

If you are running Ubuntu, we first have to resolve two dependencies required for the dotdeb packages. If you are running the amd64 version, you should replace i386 with amd64.

For Debian you won't have to do this!

cd /tmp

wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/k/krb5/libkrb53_1.6.dfsg.4~beta1-5ubuntu2_i386.deb

wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/i/icu/libicu38_3.8-6ubuntu0.2_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Again, this is only required if you're on Ubuntu.

The rest of the tutorial applies to both Ubuntu & Debian.

We'll have to add the dotdeb repository to the APT sources, so we can use their packaged PHP 5.3 and php-fpm:

sudo echo "deb http://php53.dotdeb.org stable all" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Update apt:

sudo apt-get update

The resulting text should include dotdeb.

Now we'll install PHP (part 1):

sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-common php5-suhosin

We have to install the cli before the rest, because this will cause problems later on.

sudo apt-get install php5-fpm php5-cgi

If you are planning to use a database or require specific modules (mcrypt, ldap, snmp etc) you can install them as well.

Ok, so now we have nginx and PHP.

One minor remark: If you are using "php short tags" (<?) you should enable them in your php.ini files (for both fpm and cli). If you do not change this, you will see your code in plain text!

Step 3 - Finalizing

Restart nginx in order to catch up with the config changes we made earlier.

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

The restart should have gone without any problems.

After installing php5-fpm, it should have been started. If you did change your php.ini files, you have to restart php5-fpm.

sudo /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart

All right. They should now both be running.

Step 4 - Testing

In order to test if the execution of PHP is working, create an index.php file in /var/www with the following content:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Visit your webserver and you should be able to see the generated phpinfo. If not, something went wrong.

Step 5 - Troubleshooting & Final notes

If you did not see the phpinfo, there might be something wrong. In order to track down what went wrong, you can check the nginx error log:

sudo tail /var/log/nginx/error.log

Remember, if you did change your php.ini you have to restart php5-fpm. Restarting nginx isn't' necessary.

In my example config I've enabled the fastcgi error interception. If a serious error occurs (for instance a "cannot redeclare class xyz"), nginx can catch this page and show a "nice" error page that something went wrong. This way, there is less information given out in case something is going seriously wrong.

If you do not like this, you can turn it off.

If php5-fpm is not running, your PHP files cannot be parsed and nginx will show the user an error page.

Well, I guess we're done and you are now able to serve PHP with your new nginx based webserver. Nginx is pretty nice and you can configure a lot. If you need rewrites, be aware that nginx does not work with .htaccess files. You will need to change your vhost settings in order for the rewrites to work.