The installation of a server LEMP Linux + Nginx + MySQL + PHP might be more useful and efficient than an Apache (server LAMP).
Nginx installation
It will be essential to know the machine’s IP address to install from ifconfig.
ifconfig eth0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2 }'
addr:10.0.0.8
From your system on Debian 8, we install nginx via the command :
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install nginx
Your server nginx is now operational and available except if a rule prevent the streams HTTP and in this case, you have to check netfilter (iptables / ufw).
http://server_domain_or_address_IP
MySQL installation
Then, you need to install MySQL via the following command :
apt-get install mysql-server
During the installation, you will be asked to choose a password root.
It is advisable to carefully choose your password preferably alphanumerical and including special characters.
To proceed with the installation, the following command has to be executed :
mysql_secure_installation
Enter your password root when requested and confirm the four following questions with yes :
Enter current password for root (enter for none):
OK, successfully used password, moving on...
Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
... Success!
Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
... Success!
Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Dropping test database...
... Success!
- Removing privileges on test database...
... Success!
Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
... Success!
Cleaning up...
PHP installation
Since Nginx does not contain PHP natively, it is important to install the PHP process manager called PHP FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) :
sudo apt-get install php5-fpm php5-mysql
Then, we are going to change the PHP configuration by changing the cgi.fix_pathinfo variable value to 1 or simply un-comment the line :
vim /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini cgi.fix_pathinfo=1
Finally, we restart the PHP service :
systemctl restart php5-fpm
Nginx configuration
Now, we are going to change our default vhost so that Nginx uses the PHP processor :
vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/default
The red elements need to be added to the default vhost file :
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
root /var/www/html;
index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
server_name server_domain_or_address_IP;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
}
Now, we need to check the Nginx configuration then reload the service and in case of error, we would have to review the previous configured file :
nginx -t nginx -s reload
Use
To conclude, we are going to test pour LEMP server with a page phpinfo :
echo "<php phpinfo(); >" > /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
The result is available from the url http://server_domain_or_address_IP/phpinfo.php and it leads to the following result :
From now on, your LEMP server is operational and will allow you performance enhancements, especially in terms of requests number compared to a LAMP server on Apache.
