FastCGI
FastCGI is a PHP implementation of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). It works especially well with NGINX.
Setup Files
The recommendation is to either serve web content from:
a dedicated top-level directory (such as /srv) that can be easily separately-mounted with special settings (i.e. ro--the read-only fstab option) B. the traditional web content directory, /var/www
Note that any directory can be a mounted device, but there are complications with applying special settings to directories that many package managers expect to be able to write to.
Write the below to cgi/test.php, under whichever directory structure you prefer.
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
Setup User
Linux permissions and restrictions are most easily done through users, groups, and umasks. The recommendation is to set a specific user and group for the web service. The common options are www-data (Apache) and http (PHP).
Depending on your ditro, these users and groups may already be created. See details on running useradd and groupadd in UserSetup.
Setup Software
At a minimum, we need: php, php-fpm, fcgi, fcgiwrap, and nginx.
Common additional tools include:
- apache2-utils (a.k.a. apache-tools, httpd-utils, etc.) for creating .htpasswd files for basic restrictions
PHP
The primary configuration for PHP is found in /etc/php/php.ini. Some distributions carry two versions--php.ini-production which is more secure and php.ini-development which is more backwards-compatible. Chuck the latter straight into the bin.
PHP-FPM
FastCGI
NGINX
Startup