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This “how to” guide will step you through the process of setting up Nginx, PHP, and MySQL on Ubuntu 13.04.
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This “how to” guide will step you through the process of setting up Nginx, PHP, and MySQL on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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Nginx (pronounced Engine-X) is a fast & lightweight HTTP and HTTPS web server (it can also act as a reverse proxy, and perform load balancing).
Its small memory footprint requirements make it great for systems with small amounts of memory, such as low end cloud servers. Nginx is great for serving static files to users, and is cable of handling more than 10,000 simultaneous connections, but it lacks the embedded module support for PHP as Apache does.
Thankfully you can use the PHP FPM FastCGI package to add PHP support to Nginx, and end up with a PHP enabled web server running on a low footprint setup. Nginx essentially offloads processing of .php files to the PHP FPM Fast CGI package, which in turn passes the interpreted script information back to Nginx, to return back to the end user.

Note: If you encounter issues with adding the 3rd party repository’s for php-fpm in this article, please see the revised article here:
Installing NGINX, PHP, and MySQL on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS using php-cgi.
This revised article linked above uses the php5-cgi module from the standard Ubuntu repositories, instead of php5-fpm from 3rd party repositories.

The how to article below describes installing the usual components for the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), however the Apache part is exchanged for Nginx.
Make sure the apt sources are up to date before installing:

$ sudo apt-get update

Install MySQL:

$ sudo apt-get install -y mysql-server mysql-client

You will be asked to enter a “root” password for the MySQL server. Generate a strong password, type it in, and keep note of it for future reference.
Run through the “mysql_secure_installation” script to lock down the MySQL installation.

$ mysql_secure_installation

You will generally want to answer the prompts with “y”, apart from the first, asking if you want to change the root MySQL password. Assuming you set a strong password in the previous step, you can select “n” for this question.
Install Nginx:

$ sudo apt-get install -y nginx

To use PHP with Nginx, you require the PHP Fast CGI package. To install the PHP Fast CGI package on Ubuntu 10.04, you first need to add an additional repository:

$ sudo apt-get install -y python-software-properties
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/php5
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:brianmercer/php
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:brianmercer/php5
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:l-mierzwa/lucid-php5

Note: If you get errors here, check the comments for other repository’s you can use instead.
Update the apt package sources again to ensure the newly added repository has been updated.

$ sudo apt-get update

Install PHP and any other modules that you may require:

$ sudo apt-get install -y php5-fpm php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-idn php-pear php5-imagick \
php5-imap php5-mcrypt php5-memcache php5-mhash php5-ming php5-ps php5-pspell php5-recode \
php5-snmp php5-sqlite php5-tidy php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-json

Note: You can modify the above command to add/remove individual PHP packages if needed. The php5-fpm package is however required when used with Nginx.
Edit the Nginx configuration file so that it knows what to do with .PHP files:

$ sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

There will be a section with the heading starting with “pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server” as seen below:

        # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
        #
        #location ~ \.php$ {
                #fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
                #fastcgi_index  index.php;
                #fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
                #includefastcgi_params;
        #}

Uncomment the lines as shown below, and modify the “fastcgi_param” line to reflect your website folder path. In my example I am using /var/www.
Also take note of the space added to the “include” line. For some reason the example code in the config file was missing the space. Add this space (or tab) as per the below example.

        # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
        #
        location ~ \.php$ {
                fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index  index.php;
                fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www$fastcgi_script_name;
                include fastcgi_params;
        }

Save and exit the editor.
Please note that there could be potential security issues with this generic base configuration (particularly if you are running a publicly accessible website, and allow file uploads). If you would like further information on this, please read the blog post at https://nealpoole.com/blog/2011/04/setting-up-php-fastcgi-and-nginx-dont-trust-the-tutorials-check-your-configuration/ and also read through the Nginx documentation.
Restart PHP Fast CGI:

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

Note: php5-fpm should start automatically after being installed, but we will ensure that it is running by issuing the restart command.
Start Nginx:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

Create a .php file containing the following PHP code and save it in your website folder and call it test.php (/var/www/test.php in my example.):

<?PHP
   phpinfo();
?>

Load up your site in a browser, and add the file /test.php to the url, and make sure it comes up with the usual PHP information page, and not just the source code for the .php file you created.
You should now have a working Nginx, PHP, and MySQL stack. Read the Nginx documentation for more detailed configuration options.
The Nginx documentation can be found on the Nginx website at http://nginx.org/