Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By : Clement Nedelcu
Book Image

Nginx HTTP Server, Third Edition

By: Clement Nedelcu

Overview of this book

Nginx is a lightweight HTTP server designed for high-traffic websites, with network scalability as the primary objective. With the advent of high speed Internet access, short loading times and fast transfer rates have become a necessity. This free, open source solution will either come as a full replacement of other software such as Apache, or stand in front of your existing infrastructure to improve its overall speed. This book is a detailed guide to setting up Nginx in different ways that correspond to actual production situations: as a standalone server, as a reverse proxy, interacting with applications via FastCGI, and more. In addition, this complete directive reference will be your best friend at all stages of the configuration and maintenance processes. This book is the perfect companion for both Nginx beginners and experienced administrators. For beginners, it will take you through the complete process of setting up this lightweight HTTP server on your system and configuring its various modules so it does exactly what you need quickly and securely. For more experienced administrators, this book provides different approaches that can help you make the most of your current infrastructure. Nginx can be employed in many situations, whether you are looking to construct an entirely new web-serving architecture or simply want to integrate an efficient tool to optimize your site loading speeds.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Nginx HTTP Server Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

PHP with Nginx


We are now going to configure PHP to work together with Nginx via FastCGI. Why FastCGI in particular, as opposed to the other two alternatives SCGI and uWSGI? The answer came with the release of PHP version 5.3.3. As of this version, all releases come with an integrated FastCGI process manager allowing you to easily connect applications implementing the FastCGI protocol. The only requirement is that your PHP build should have been configured with the --enable-fpm argument. If you are unsure whether your current setup includes the necessary components, worry not: a section of this chapter is dedicated to building PHP with everything we need. Alternatively, the php-fpm or php5-fpm packages can be found in most repositories.

Architecture

Before starting the setup process, it's important to understand the way PHP interacts with Nginx. We have established that FastCGI is a communication protocol running through sockets, which implies that there is a client and a server. The client...