dummies guide to setting up nginx

7/28/2019 Dummies Guide to Setting Up Nginx

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Dummies Guide to Setting Up Nginx

Nginx is one of those things that many people want to try but don't. Why?

Because it's scary. Well... Nginx itself isn't scary, but all of the poor guides out

there make it a nightmare. The first step in making Nginx work for you is to

not follow 95% of the guides found on Google. That sounds backward from

what you usually hear and I do hate giving that advice. While many of the

guides out there will get you going most of the time in most situations, they

tend to be suboptimal. Many of these configurations tend to focus on

reproducing how Apache does things. Fortunately, they are not the same

thing and are in fact quite different. Even the guide in the Linode Library will

yield poor results (which is uncommon for them).

So where should you go for help? Kind of easy actually. Nginx has a fantastic

wiki for most of your questions at http://wiki.nginx.org/ . There is an Nginx

support channel (#nginx on irc.freenode.net) as well. Once you know what

tends to be wrong in most examples you'll be able to start using Google. The

reason being that most of the advanced stuff you find floating around is

usually pretty solid. The issue is just that people get so excited by Nginx that

when they see it's power they want to say something before they fully

understand what's going on.

My aim here isn't to provide a dead simple solution for everything you will

ever want to do with Nginx. Consider this more like a guide to the basics.

Let's get started.

I use Debian and Ubuntu, you may have to alter things to fit your distribution.

Installing Stuff

A very common use case for web servers is PHP based Content Management

Systems. A majority of the time, people settle on MySQL as their database. I'll

also assume you want a self managed PHP system as you would get in

Apache with mod_php. Do you also want the latest and greatest version of

Nginx and PHP?
http://wiki.nginx.org/http://wiki.nginx.org/


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If your distribution does not have php5-fpm as an available package (think

pre-ubuntu_11.04) you will want the new stuff. This is in a nice spiffy Personal

Package Archive (PPA) which is maintained by the Nginx community. To add

these PPA's for the latest and greatest:

aptitude install python-software-properties

add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/stable

echo 'deb http://packages.dotdeb.org squeeze all' >> /etc/apt/sources.list

wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg -0- | sudo apt-key add -

aptitude update

Note: If you'd like to use only PHP5 from dotdeb, which is probably a good

idea, then copy the preferences.txt attachment to /etc/apt/preferences. This

will make dotdeb the lowest priority except for php5* which will be the

highest priority.

GREAT! Access to some super neat stuff. Let's get it all installed!

aptitude install nginx-light mysql-server php5-mysql php5-fpm php-apc

You'll get asked for a root password for MySQL. Pick something secure and

don't forget it. At this point you have everything installed that you need. You

just don't have it configured yet. We don't _have_ to stop these services while

we're working on them but we should.
http://packages.dotdeb.org/http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpghttp://packages.dotdeb.org/http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg


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/etc/init.d/php5-fpm stop

/etc/init.d/mysql stop

/etc/init.d/nginx stop

Configuring Stuff

We may as well start with MySQL since it's the easiest. Edit the file

/etc/mysql/my.cnf. Add this stuff to the very bottom.

default-storage-engine = innodb

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 128M

innodb_log_file_size = 10M # May need to purge (rm)

/var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile*

innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT

innodb_file_per_table = 1

innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2

innodb_log_buffer_size = 1M

innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M

# num cpu's/cores *2 is a good base line for innodb_thread_concurrency

innodb_thread_concurrency = 8

innodb_open_files = 1024

ignore-builtin-innodb

innodb_file_per_table

plugin-

load=innodb=ha_innodb_plugin.so;innodb_trx=ha_innodb_plugin.so;innodb_l

ocks=ha_innodb_plugin.so;innodb_lock_waits=ha_innodb_plugin.so;innodb_c

mp=ha_innodb_plugin.so;innodb_cmp_reset=ha_innodb_plugin.so;innodb_cm


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pmem=ha_innodb_plugin.so;innodb_cmpmem_reset=ha_innodb_plugin.so

I'd rather not go into detail about each piece here. I'll sum it up this way... It

won't save you any RAM. In fact, this will use additional RAM. It will, however,

make thing faster and more efficient. It's kind of a "MySQL Magic Sauce" I

cooked up over some time that I have yet to find issues with.

Now for that PHP tuning. PHP-FPM works great out of the box. However, it's

configured with defaults that are a little less than optimal. For starters, it uses

a TCP socket as opposed to a UNIX socket. The TCP socket is more universal,

but not more efficient. It is also configured to use dynamic processes which

are not ideal either. Lastly, it is setup with huge amounts of RAM allocated to

each PHP process. This is fine consiering all of the horribly inefficent PHP apps

out there. If you're running something sane, then it's just crazy. Below, I

included the lines that I changed in /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf.

listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.sock

listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1

listen.owner = www-data

listen.group = www-data

listen.mode = 0660

user = www-data

group = www-data

pm = static

pm.max_children = 10

pm.max_requests = 1000

php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 32M

Now, we move onto Nginx configuration. The best part of this is that the most


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common cases already have templates for you. The default install comes with

a default configuration file in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/. Quite simply, this file

should just be deleted if you have a clue what you're doing. It's useful

because it's loaded with comments, examples, and links.

I personally prefer keeping site configs in /etc/nginx/conf.d/.config. Others

prefer keeping configs in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ and then creating a

symlink to it from /etc/nginx/sites-available/. Either option yields the exact

same result. The only thing you should not do is keep everything in the same

file. It creates a maintenance nightmare.

Let's say you're wanting to run a Drupal and you unpacked into

/var/www/drupal/. Go to http://wiki.nginx.org/Drupal . Copy/paste that

configuration example to your configuration file. Edit the line that says

'root /var/www/drupal6;' and point it to where you unpacked Drupal

(/var/www/drupal). You will also want to edit the line that says 'server_name

domain.tld;'. This should be the domain name that will be used to access your

site.

Well... Let's see....

We installed the packages, configured them, tuned a few things, grabbed the

source for a CMS, set it up, ect. What now? Let's fire it all up.

/etc/init.d/php5-fpm start

/etc/init.d/mysql start

/etc/init.d/nginx start

Of course you still need to create a database and user to access that

database as well as configure your CMS or whatever it may be. This should

give you an excellent start to your server.
http://wiki.nginx.org/Drupalhttp://wiki.nginx.org/Drupal


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Further reading can be found on the Nginx Wiki. You definitely want to check

out this resource before consulting other resources.

http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls

http://wiki.nginx.org/Configuration

My server is a Linode. I use their smallest plan because I can't peg the

resources it offers.

Proc: 'Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5630 @ 2.13GHz' 4-core

RAM: 512MB

The results:

Transactions: 44965 hits

Availability: 99.91 %

Elapsed time: 59.95 secs

Data transferred: 329.59 MB

Response time: 0.12 secs

Transaction rate: 750.04 trans/sec

Throughput: 5.50 MB/sec

Concurrency: 89.90

Successful transactions: 44965

Failed transactions: 40

Longest transaction: 0.20

Shortest transaction: 0.03

Those results are local (to avoid network bottlenecks) and from the largest

page on my site which uses multipl db queries and runs the whole stack. The

results are also nothing that exciting. I'm actually rather disappointed. I guess
http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfallshttp://wiki.nginx.org/Configurationhttp://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfallshttp://wiki.nginx.org/Configuration


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I'm not too worried about it though.

My advertisement... If you're interested in a low cost VPS with incredible

support and uptime, check out Linode. If you use the link provided you will

notice it has my referral code. I get a little gift from them, you get it too if you

sign up and someone uses your referral code. When I say excellent support- I

mean it. I accidentally deleted my virtual disk, and these guys grabbed it

from the grave for me. I screwed up with recreating a node, these guys spent

hours repairing my mistake.

dummies guide to setting up nginx

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