Nginx Installation Notes

Nginx is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Unlike traditional servers, Nginx doesn’t rely on threads to handle requests. Instead it uses a much more scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. This architecture uses small, but more importantly, predictable amounts of memory under load.

The PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is usually used to allow Nginx to process PHP files. Nowadays, PHP-FPM is bundled with any Unix PHP distribution. Phalcon + Nginx + PHP-FPM provides a powerful set of tools that offer maximum performance for your PHP applications.

Configuring Nginx for Phalcon

The following are potential configurations you can use to setup nginx with Phalcon.

Dedicated Instance

server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  localhost;

    charset      utf-8;

    #access_log  /var/log/nginx/host.access.log  main;

    location / {
        root   /srv/www/htdocs/phalcon-website/public;
        index  index.php index.html index.htm;

        # if file exists return it right away
        if (-f $request_filename) {
            break;
        }

        # otherwise rewrite it
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
            rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?_url=$1 last;
            break;
        }
    }

    location ~ \.php {
        # try_files    $uri =404;

        fastcgi_index  /index.php;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_split_path_info       ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }

    location ~* ^/(css|img|js|flv|swf|download)/(.+)$ {
        root $root_path;
    }
}

Configuration by Host

And this second configuration allow you to have different configurations by host:

server {
    listen      80;
    server_name localhost;
    set         $root_path '/var/www/$host/public';
    root        $root_path;

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/$host-access.log;
    error_log   /var/log/nginx/$host-error.log error;

    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    try_files $uri $uri/ @rewrite;

    location @rewrite {
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?_url=$1;
    }

    location ~ \.php {
        # try_files    $uri =404;

        fastcgi_index  /index.php;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_split_path_info       ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO       $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }

    location ~* ^/(css|img|js|flv|swf|download)/(.+)$ {
        root $root_path;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}