Steps to Migrating from Apache2 to NGINX
First, we will install NGINX and PHP-FPM:
sudo apt-get install nginx php5-fpm
Next, we will need to update the PHP-FPM config at /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
My server has 4 cores, so this is what my www.conf file looks like:
user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
worker_cpu_affinity 0001 0010 0100 1000;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 2048;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
keepalive_timeout 5;
tcp_nodelay on;
server_tokens off;
gzip on;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}
After making the changes to PHP-FPM we will need to restart the service:
sudo /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart
Now we can setup our NGINX config at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Configurations will vary based on your server and web site, but these setting worked for me, find and change these values in the nginx.conf file:
pm.max_children = 5
pm.start_servers = 2
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 3
pm.max_requests = 100
php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 128M
Note: Be sure and remove any leading semicolons (;)
After NGINX is configured, restart the service:
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
Creating the Domain Configuration Files in NGINX
In Apache, any domains that are hosted on the server are configured in “/etc/apache2/sites-available/“, and NGINX has its equivalent configuration files in “/etc/nginx/sites-available/“, so the next step is to create those new files in the NGINX directory. I am running WordPress websites on my server, so this is what works best for me:
server {
listen 80;
server_name [domain.com] *.[domain.com];
root /var/www/[domain.com]/public;
access_log /var/www/[domain.com]/log/access.log;
error_log /var/www/[domain.com]/log/error.log;
location / {
index index.php;
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
}
# Add trailing slash to */wp-admin requests.
rewrite /wp-admin$ $scheme://$host$uri/ permanent;
# Directives to send expires headers and turn off 404 error logging.
location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
expires 24h;
log_not_found off;
}
# this prevents hidden files (beginning with a period) from being served
location ~ /\. { access_log off; log_not_found off; deny all; }
location ~ \.php$ {
client_max_body_size 25M;
try_files $uri =404;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
}
#Once the w3-total.conf file is ready uncomment out the line below
#include w3-total.conf;
}
Once the config files in the sites-available directory are ready, we just need to “publish” the sites to the web by creating a symlink to the file from the “sites-enabled” directory:
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/[domain.com] /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/[domain.com]
After we have updated our site configurations, we will stop Apache and restart NGINX:
service apache2 stop
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart
Removing Apache
Once we are confidant that NGINX is running and apache is no longer needed, we will simply remove Apache from our web server.
sudo apt-get remove apache2*
References
http://articles.slicehost.com/2008/5/16/ubuntu-hardy-nginx-virtual-hosts/
http://evansolomon.me/notes/faster-wordpress-multisite-nginx-batcache/
