ToDo List Sample running on Nginx

Now that Laravel 5 has been installed and running on Apache server (Laravel 5 Todo sample app).

Now we want to run it on Nginx.

Install the missing PHP tools needed to actually run the Laravel code:

$ sudo apt-get install php5-fpm

Open the main PHP configuration file (/etc/php5/fpm/php.ini) for the PHP-fpm processor that Nginx uses. We only need to modify one value for the cgi.fix_pathinfo parameter. We need to uncomment this and set it to "0". This is to guard against a potential attacker who may want to run a script with a similar name.

Enable the MCrypt extension, which Laravel depends on:

$ sudo php5enmod mcrypt

Since we made some changes, we need to restart the php5-fpm service:

$ sudo service php5-fpm restart

First, let's work on nginx related setup.

/etc/nginx/sites-available/laravel.example.com:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root /var/www/todo/public;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name laravel.example.com;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }
}

We will set the fastcgi_* directives so that the path of requests are correctly split for execution, and make sure that Nginx uses the socket that php5-fpm is using for communication and that the index.php file is used as the index for these operations.

Then, we need to set the SCRIPT_FILENAME parameter so that PHP can locate the requested files correctly:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root /var/www/todo/public;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name laravel.example.com;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

Actually, I'm using Nginx for another sites. So, I switched to a new port, 8001, like this:

# /etc/nginx/sites-available/laravel.example.com

server {
    listen 8001 default_server;
    listen [::]:8001 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root root /var/www/todo/public;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name laravel.example.com;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

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

Here is our page with a new port, 8001:

Another site can be configured like this (/etc/nginx/sites-available/epicmath.example.com):

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
...

So, our activated sites are now look like this:

$ ls -la /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
epicmath.example.com -> /etc/nginx/sites-available/epicmath.example.com
laravel.example.com -> /etc/nginx/sites-available/laravel.example.com