How to install a web server with Nginx + MySQL + PHP5 + APC + Spawn_FastCGI [2nd Part: Nginx]

Some time ago I told you about this series of tutorials, on how to install and configure a server for high demand hosting. This article will be about installing and configuring Nginx:

NGINX:

We already told you about Nginx earlier in the article Nginx: An interesting alternative to Apache, there we told you that it is a web server like Apache, LightHttpd or Cherokee, but compared to Apache it stands out for its performance and low hardware consumption, precisely why many large sites such as Facebook, MyOpera.com, DropBox or even WordPress .com use Nginx instead of Apache. In the world of Linux DesdeLinux It is not the only one that uses Nginx, as far as I know, emsLinux and MuyLinux also use it :)

My personal experience with Nginx dates back several years, when out of necessity I started looking for lightweight alternatives to Apache. At that time Nginx was on version 0.6 and its compatibility with high demand sites made in PHP was not the most optimal, however nowadays from version 0.9 onwards (v1.2.1 available on Debian Stable, v1.4.2 available on ArchLinux) has improved a lot, to the point that with a proper configuration and union of Nginx + PHP everything will work like a charm.

In this tutorial series I will use Nginx version 1.2.1-2.2, available in the Debian Stable repos (Wheezy).

1. Installation:

We will start with the first thing, install Nginx from our repositories.

If on your server you use a distribution such as Debian, Ubuntu or some derivative in the terminal you must put the following and press Enter :

aptitude install nginx

In case you use another distribution on your server such as CentOS, Red Hat, Fedora, simply install the package: nginx from the official repository

2. Configuration:

We already have Nginx installed, but we obviously need to configure it. I have prepared a compressed file on FTP which contains all the configurations that are used on the servers. DesdeLinux, both for PHP, Nginx, etc. Let's download and unzip that file:

cd ~ && wget http://ftp.desdelinux.net/nginx-spawn-fastcgi.tar.gz && tar xf nginx-spawn-fastcgi.tar.gz

This will create a folder called nginx-spawn-fastcgi, from it we will need two files for pure Nginx (that is, without linking it to PHP):

• nginx.conf - »Main Nginx configuration file (we will talk about its content later)
• index.html - »A simple html file that we will use to see if Nginx really works for us in its most basic form
• mywebsite.net - »Configuration file for a simple website, a VHost (Virtual Host) that will configure access to the previous html

Let's first move to the Nginx settings folder:

cd /etc/nginx/

Then let's remove its default configuration and put our own:

mv nginx.conf nginx.conf_BK && cp ~/nginx-spawn-fastcgi/nginx.conf ./

This, as I said, is the main Nginx configuration file, in it I have already defined the following:

user www-data; worker_processes 4; pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

User access to the file system (with which nginx will access everywhere), number of processes to work with and also the PID (nginx process id).

We also have there a small block called events (settings for events) that contains a line that indicates the maximum number of connections allowed per event. Below is the block called http.

This http block is the one that contains almost everything related to hosting, at least many things that will interest you. For example, the maximum time to live or wait (timeout), where will our general logs (access.log and error.log) be, data compression using gzip, as well as other rules that could be useful in the future.

Once the main configuration file is in place, let's copy the file from our VHost to the sites-available folder

cp ~/nginx-spawn-fastcgi/mywebsite.net sites-available/

In addition, we must make a symbolic link from this file to the sites-enabled folder.

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/mywebsite.net /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

I explain the usefulness of having sites-enabled and sites-available.

They will find moments when they must have several vhost files ready and configured, because in that server they will put online, say 5 sites. However, it happens that it is not yet the time to enable 2 of those 5 vhosts, but they must have the files ready so that when necessary they are online in the shortest possible time. You can put as many vhosts as you want in sites-available (sites-available), because the ones that Nginx reads to put online are only those of sites-enabled (sites-enabled), it would also work in reverse, in case you want to put offline ( temporarily for example) a site, there is no need to delete files from your server (files that we will need at another time), we simply remove the symbolic link of sites-enabled and that's it. The usefulness of having symbolic links and not simply copying the file from one folder to another, is that when we want to edit a vhost, it does not matter if we edit the one located in enabled or available, in the end it is the same
archive.

The file mywebsite.net as I had said before, a vhost that serves as an example, that is, and in other words, we must modify mywebsite.net and establish our configurations.

We must change the following:

• access_log (line 3): This will be the path of the access log file to this site
• error_log (line 4): This will be the path of the error log file to this site
• server_name (line 5): The URL, domain that is hosted in that folder, for example, if it were the forum DesdeLinux it would be: forum server_name.desdelinux.net
• root (line 6): The path to the folder where the html files are, let's leave this in / var / www / as it will only be a test

Now we just need to copy the html file to the folder that we define in our VHost file, / var / www /:

mkdir /var/www/ && cp ~/nginx-spawn-fastcgi/index.html /var/www/

Then we restart Nginx and that's it:

service nginx restart

And voila, something like this will appear:

I remind you that we are working first with Nginx for HTML, without having PHP support, this install PHP and link it to Nginx will be the content of the next tutorial (in a few days, I promise).

Anyway, this is the Nginx installation and configuration tutorial so that it works pure, that is, an HTML site, I hope it will be of interest to you.

I will clarify that yes, there are still best practices that can be put to use, however let's wait to finish this series of tutorials and then we will evaluate the final result of the work 😉

regards