In this howto, I’ll show you how to install NGINX with PHP and Rails support. The difference to all these other howtos out there, is that we won’t use Passenger. Right, we will NOT use passenger. We’ll use Unicorn to connect NGINX with Rails. If you want to know more about Unicorn, read this from GitHub.
Step 1 – Homebrew
Grap a copy of homebrew and install it: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ Optional – Install MySQL Now install mysql if you haven’t yet.
brew install mysql
Step 2 – NGINX installation
OK, let’s do the NGinx installation, simple isn’t it ?
brew install nginx
Step 3 – PHP installation
Now, we’ll install a new version of php (the OSX version of php won’t be replaced, they will live side by side). Our version will have support for PHP’s FastCGI Process Manager.
wget https://github.com/ampt/homebrew/raw/php/Library/Formula/php.rb
mv php.rb `brew --prefix`/Library/Formula
brew install php --with-mysql --with-fpm
Go and grab a cup of coffee. The compilation of php may take some minutes depending on your machine. So, let’s start PHP-FPM with this command.
sudo /usr/local/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /usr/local/Cellar/php/5.3.8/etc/php-fpm.conf
Step 5 – NGINX configuration
Your nginx.conf shoud be placed in /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf. I provided you below an example config for using NGINX with phpmyadmin(or whatever you want) and a rails app
# This is example contains the bare mininum to get nginx going with
# Unicorn or Rainbows! servers. Generally these configuration settings
# are applicable to other HTTP application servers (and not just Ruby
# ones), so if you have one working well for proxying another app
# server, feel free to continue using it.
#
# The only setting we feel strongly about is the fail_timeout=0
# directive in the "upstream" block. max_fails=0 also has the same
# effect as fail_timeout=0 for current versions of nginx and may be
# used in its place.
#
# Users are strongly encouraged to refer to nginx documentation for more
# details and search for other example configs.
# you generally only need one nginx worker unless you’re serving
# large amounts of static files which require blocking disk reads
worker_processes 1;
# # drop privileges, root is needed on most systems for binding to port 80
# # (or anything < 1024). Capability-based security may be available for # # your system and worth checking out so you won’t need to be root to # # start nginx to bind on 80 user nobody nogroup; # for systems with a “nogroup” # user nobody nobody; # for systems with “nobody” as a group instead # Feel free to change all paths to suite your needs here, of course pid /tmp/nginx.pid; error_log /tmp/nginx.error.log; events { worker_connections 1024; # increase if you have lots of clients accept_mutex off; # “on” if nginx worker_processes > 1
# use epoll; # enable for Linux 2.6+
# use kqueue; # enable for FreeBSD, OSX
}
http {
# nginx will find this file in the config directory set at nginx build time
include mime.types;
# fallback in case we can’t determine a type
default_type application/octet-stream;
# click tracking!
access_log /tmp/nginx.access.log combined;
# you generally want to serve static files with nginx since neither
# Unicorn nor Rainbows! is optimized for it at the moment
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on; # off may be better for *some* Comet/long-poll stuff
tcp_nodelay off; # on may be better for some Comet/long-poll stuff
# we haven’t checked to see if Rack::Deflate on the app server is
# faster or not than doing compression via nginx. It’s easier
# to configure it all in one place here for static files and also
# to disable gzip for clients who don’t get gzip/deflate right.
# There are other other gzip settings that may be needed used to deal with
# bad clients out there, see http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpGzipModule
gzip on;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_min_length 500;
gzip_disable “MSIE [1-6]\.”;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/xml text/css
text/comma-separated-values
text/javascript application/x-javascript
application/atom+xml;
# this can be any application server, not just Unicorn/Rainbows!
upstream app_server {
# fail_timeout=0 means we always retry an upstream even if it failed
# to return a good HTTP response (in case the Unicorn master nukes a
# single worker for timing out).
# for UNIX domain socket setups:
server unix:/tmp/.sock fail_timeout=0;
# for TCP setups, point these to your backend servers
# server 192.168.0.7:8080 fail_timeout=0;
# server 192.168.0.8:8080 fail_timeout=0;
# server 192.168.0.9:8080 fail_timeout=0;
}
# phpmyadmin
server {
listen 8080;
server_name localadmin;
location / {
root /opt/www/phpmyadmin;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
}
location ~ .php {
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /opt/www/phpmyadmin/$fastcgi_script_name;
}
}
server {
# enable one of the following if you’re on Linux or FreeBSD
listen 8080 default; # for Linux
# listen 80 default accept_filter=httpready; # for FreeBSD
# If you have IPv6, you’ll likely want to have two separate listeners.
# One on IPv4 only (the default), and another on IPv6 only instead
# of a single dual-stack listener. A dual-stack listener will make
# for ugly IPv4 addresses in $remote_addr (e.g “:ffff:10.0.0.1″
# instead of just “10.0.0.1″) and potentially trigger bugs in
# some software.
# listen [::]:80 ipv6only=on; # deferred or accept_filter recommended
client_max_body_size 4G;
server_name localocs;
# ~2 seconds is often enough for most folks to parse HTML/CSS and
# retrieve needed images/icons/frames, connections are cheap in
# nginx so increasing this is generally safe…
keepalive_timeout 5;
# path for static files
root /opt/caesar/public;
# Prefer to serve static files directly from nginx to avoid unnecessary
# data copies from the application server.
#
# try_files directive appeared in in nginx 0.7.27 and has stabilized
# over time. Older versions of nginx (e.g. 0.6.x) requires
# “if (!-f $request_filename)” which was less efficient:
# http://bogomips.org/unicorn.git/tree/examples/nginx.conf?id=v3.3.1#n127
try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri @app;
location @app {
# an HTTP header important enough to have its own Wikipedia entry:
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
# enable this if and only if you use HTTPS, this helps Rack
# set the proper protocol for doing redirects:
# proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
# pass the Host: header from the client right along so redirects
# can be set properly within the Rack application
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
# we don’t want nginx trying to do something clever with
# redirects, we set the Host: header above already.
proxy_redirect off;
# set “proxy_buffering off” *only* for Rainbows! when doing
# Comet/long-poll/streaming. It’s also safe to set if you’re using
# only serving fast clients with Unicorn + nginx, but not slow
# clients. You normally want nginx to buffer responses to slow
# clients, even with Rails 3.1 streaming because otherwise a slow
# client can become a bottleneck of Unicorn.
#
# The Rack application may also set “X-Accel-Buffering (yes|no)”
# in the response headers do disable/enable buffering on a
# per-response basis.
# proxy_buffering off;
proxy_pass http://app_server;
}
# Rails error pages
error_page 500 502 503 504 /500.html;
location = /500.html {
root /path/to/app/current/public;
}
}
}
Step 6 – Starting NGINX
sudo /usr/local/sbin/nginx -c /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
if you want to stop NGINX, use this command
sudo /usr/local/sbin/nginx -s stop
Step 7 – Let’s do it the unicorn way
Install the gem and copy an example configuration in your rails app directory. The configuration should be placed in /PATH_TO_RAILS/APP/config.
gem install unicorn
curl -o config/unicorn.rb https://raw.github.com/defunkt/unicorn/master/examples/unicorn.conf.rb
Edit the unicorn.rb to your desire ,it’s well commented and please remember to change the port to 8081! NGINX will run on port 8080 with the above nginx.conf, so unicorn cun’t run on the same port. The line you have to change for the port should look like this:
listen 8081, :tcp_nopush => true # from 8080 to 8081
Finally start unicorn und point your browser to http://localocs:8080 or http://localadmin to watch the working result. Please remember that you can change localocs or localadmin to whatever you like, but don’t forget to edit your /etc/hosts file in any case !
unicorn_rails -c ./config/unicorn.rb -D