How to use nginx with PHP?

Question

What is a good way of using PHP with nginx? From the finding I got, maybe using PHP-FPM might be a good way of handing PHP behind nginx.

The problem we have is that the free web based API we serve gets a lot of request (about 500K a day), mostly the requests are very short and small in size but Apache is consuming a lot of memory. I want to try nginx to see if it can handle it better.

Thanks

Answer 1

Here is the link where you can setup nginx + php-fpm + apc http://interfacelab.com/nginx-php-fpm-apc-awesome/

In my opinion, use php + lighttpd to handle that request. Lighttpd is the the best webserver to handle many request with only require small memory. After then point your nginx proxy to where lighttpd listen.

Answer 2

1. Ubuntu Lucid 64-bit
2. apt-get install nginx
3. apt-get update
4. apt-get install php5-cli php5-common php5-suhosin
5. apt-get install python-software-properties
6. add-apt-repository ppa:brianmercer/php
7. apt-get update && apt-get install php5-fpm php5-cgi
8. /etc/init.d/nginx restart
9. /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart

Edit (might need this in your site conf) :

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_read_timeout 60000;
        fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/site$fastcgi_script_name;
        include         fastcgi_params;
    }
    location ~ /\.ht {
            deny  all;
    }