Unfortunately, its back to the techie stuff for a few posts!

Here are my crib notes on installing NGinx on one of our client servers.

Add spawn-fcgi (cos its split from litettpd now) http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/spawn-fcgi/wiki/SVN


cd /downloads
svn co svn://svn.lighttpd.net/spawn-fcgi/trunk spawn-fcgi


No svn..grrr


apt-get install subversion subversion-tools
svn co svn://svn.lighttpd.net/spawn-fcgi/trunk spawn-fcgi
cd spawn-fcgi
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install


spawn-fcgi should be happily installed in /usr/local/bin/spawn-fcgi now

make sure we have php5-cgi
apt-get install php5-cgi

Check spawn-fcgi runs –
In my case not, had to rebuild eAccelerator @#$@#$!, did that, and all ok


/bin/spawn-fcgi -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 53217 -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid


Note port 53217 can be any unused port from some high unused number though to 65535
We’re going to be installing NGinx from debian packages, but probably better from source long term…

apt-get install nginx

pico /etc/nginx/nginx.conf


change some default settings


user www-data;
worker_processes 1;

Now we add our virtual hosts in /etc/nginx/sites-available


pico /etc/nginx/sites-available

Lastly, we add our fast-cgi settings, using our port from above 53217


fastcgi stuff here


When I get time, I go through the logs and check out how the servers are doing.

One thing that I haven’t really done recently is to optimize the way things are configured.
The typical solution in most scenario’s is to throw faster hardware at things (something we do when necessary!), but sometimes a few minutes configuration can help speed things up tremendously.

Below are some tips for optimizing apache a little.

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