I use nginx as my primary webserver for applications hosted on TheGraveyard.org, mainly because it’s simple to configure and use, lightweight and fast (or maybe because I just don’t trust server applications that just work ;-) ). Most applications are pretty easy to install once you get the hang of it, but for future reference I’ll share how I got serendipity working using nginx.
I created a user ‘blurringexistence_net’ on the webserver as whom the PHP scripts will run and set up Servitor to spawn an fcgi’d version of php:
/etc/servitor/services/fastcgi-php-blurringexistence.net:
#! /bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -n -u blurringexistence_net -g blurringexistence_net -d /srv/http/vhosts/blurringexistence_net/public_html -s /srv/http/fastcgi/blurringexistence_net-php.sock -M 0600 -U http -G http -- /usr/bin/php-cgi -c /srv/http/vhosts/blurringexistence_net/etc/php
To tune php to serendipity’s needs, I copied /etc/php/php.ini to
/srv/http/vhosts/blurringexistence_net/etc/php/php.ini (see the -c
parameter for the php-cgi command in the Servitor launch script),
changed ownership to blurringexistence_net:blurringexistence_net and
changed the post_max_size and upload_max_filesize options to 32M.
Also made sure open_basedir contains the directory where the
ImageMagick binaries are installed. Next, I created a database user and
database on the PostgreSQL server for serendipity to use.
Here’s the nginx configuration I use for which also facilitates serendipity’s pretty urls (adapted from serendipity’s .htaccess file) and SSL on port 444:
server {
listen 80;
listen 444 default ssl;
server_name blurringexistence.net www.blurringexistence.net;
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/certs/blurringexistence.net.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/certs/blurringexistence.net.key;
ssl_session_timeout 5m;
ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1;
ssl_ciphers HIGH:!ADH:!MD5;
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
error_page 404 = /index.php;
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
client_max_body_size 32m;
rewrite ^/serendipity_admin.php$ serendipity_admin.php last;
rewrite ^/((archives/([0-9]+)\-[0-9a-z\.\_!\;,\+\-\%]+\.html)/?)$ index.php?/$1 last;
rewrite ^/(authors/([0-9]+)\-[0-9a-z\.\_!\;,\+\-\%]+)$ index.php?/$1 last;
rewrite ^/(feeds/categories/([0-9\;]+)\-[0-9a-z\.\_!\;,\+\-\%]+\.rss)$ index.php?/$1 last;
rewrite ^/(feeds/authors/([0-9]+)\-[0-9a-z\.\_!\;,\+\-\%]+\.rss)$ index.php?/$1 last;
rewrite ^/(categories/([0-9\;]+)\-[0-9a-z\.\_!\;,\+\-\%]+)$ index.php?/$1 last;
rewrite ^/archives([/A-Za-z0-9]+)\.html$ index.php?url=/archives/$1.html last;
rewrite ^/([0-9]+)\-][0-9a-z\-]*\.html$ index.php?url=$1-article.html last;
rewrite ^/feeds/(.*)$ index.php?url=/feeds/$1 last;
rewrite ^/unsubscribe/(.*)/([0-9]+)$ index.php?url=/unsubscribe/$1/$2 last;
rewrite ^/approve/(.)/(.)/([0-9]+)$ index.php?url=approve/$1/$2/$3 last;
rewrite ^/delete/(.)/(.)/([0-9]+)$ index.php?url=delete/$1/$2/$3 last;
rewrite ^/(admin|entries)(/.+)?$ index.php?url=admin/ last;
rewrite ^/archive/? index.php?url=/archive last;
rewrite ^/(index|atom[0-9]*|rss|b2rss|b2rdf).(rss|rdf|rss2|xml)$ rss.php?file=$1&ext=$2;
rewrite ^/(plugin|plugin)/(.*)$ index.php?url=$1/$2 last;
rewrite ^/search/(.*)$ index.php?url=/search/$1 last;
rewrite ^/comments/(.*)$ index.php?url=/comments/$1 last;
rewrite ^/(serendipity\.css|serendipity_admin\.css)$ index.php?url=/$1 last;
rewrite ^/index\.(html?|php.+)$ index.php?url=index.html last;
rewrite ^/htmlarea/(.*)$ htmlarea/$1 last;
rewrite ^/(.*\.html?)$ index.php?url=/$1 last;
location = /50x.html {
root html;
}
location / {
root /srv/http/vhosts/blurringexistence_net/public_html;
index index.php;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
root /srv/http/vhosts/blurringexistence_net/public_html;
fastcgi_connect_timeout 60;
fastcgi_send_timeout 180;
fastcgi_read_timeout 180;
fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
fastcgi_buffers 4 256k;
fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
fastcgi_pass unix:/srv/http/fastcgi/blurringexistence_net-php.sock;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /srv/http/vhosts/blurringexistence_net/public_html$fastcgi_script_name;
set $https off;
if ($scheme = https) {
set $https on;
}
fastcgi_param HTTPS $https;
include fastcgi_params;
}
location ~ /\.ht {
deny all;
}
location ~ (\.tpl\.php|\.tpl|\.sql|\.inc\.php|\.db)$ {
deny all;
}
}
After that I installed serendipity without much trouble.
Suggestions and comments are welcome! Just leave a comment.
Note: This currently uses a home-brewn solution to run PHP scripts through FastCGI based on lighttpd’s spawn-fcgi. Sometime soon I’ll hopefully get around to changing that to use PHP-FPM.