Zend Framework with nginx and php-fastcgi

Since I while I heard good things about nginx and wanted to use it for my Zend Framework MVC applications. I just got a Ubuntu server working after one of those days that seem to be a never ending Google search and debugging session, so I thought I'd share the outcome with you.

Install packages

First off you'll need to install a couple of packages, as outlined in the excellent howto by david winter:

sudo aptitude install php5-cgi nginx

Configure PHP fastcgi

Then create an init.d file to manage the php-fastcgi process

sudo nano /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi

Inside put

#!/bin/bash
BIND=127.0.0.1:9000
USER=www-data
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=15
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=1000

PHP_CGI=/usr/bin/php-cgi
PHP_CGI_NAME=`basename $PHP_CGI`
PHP_CGI_ARGS="- USER=$USER PATH=/usr/bin PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=$PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=$PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS $PHP_CGI -b $BIND"
RETVAL=0

start() {
      echo -n "Starting PHP FastCGI: "
      start-stop-daemon --quiet --start --background --chuid "$USER" --exec /usr/bin/env -- $PHP_CGI_ARGS
      RETVAL=$?
      echo "$PHP_CGI_NAME."
}
stop() {
      echo -n "Stopping PHP FastCGI: "
      killall -q -w -u $USER $PHP_CGI
      RETVAL=$?
      echo "$PHP_CGI_NAME."
}

case "$1" in
    start)
      start
  ;;
    stop)
      stop
  ;;
    restart)
      stop
      start
  ;;
    *)
      echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
      exit 1
  ;;
esac
exit $RETVAL

Then we change permissions on this, start the fastcgi and register it as startup item

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
sudo /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start
sudo update-rc.d php-fastcgi defaults

Configure nginx

Now we need to set up a vhost for ZF application in nginx. This is a pretty straight forward job, as the nginx package in Ubuntu features the well knows sites-available/sites-enabled folder structure. I will assume that the application lives in /var/www/zfapp, has all the needed dependencies in the library folder and the host name for it will be zfapp.

First off we create a config file in the sites-available folder:

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/zfapp

Inside we put the vhost config:

server {
        listen 80;
        server_name zfapp;
        root /var/www/zfapp/public;
        index /index.php;

        # remove trailing slash, that throws ZF router
        rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 break;

        location / {
                # if file is existing, skip fastcgi parsing
                if (-e $request_filename) {
                        break;
                }

                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/zfapp/public/index.php;

                # get the relevant environment
                fastcgi_param APPLICATION_ENV staging;
        }

        # expires headers on known filetypes
        location ~* ^.+.(css|js|jpeg|jpg|gif|png|ico) {
                expires 30d;
        }
}

Now we just need to symlink this file into sites-enabled and restart nginx

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/zfapp /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/zfapp
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

That's it. Should be working.