Red Hat / CentOS Install nginx PHP5 FastCGI Webserver

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To install and configure the nginx web server with PHP5 and FastCGI on Red Hat or CentOS, you can follow these steps:

  1. Install the EPEL repository: nginx and PHP5 are not included in the default repositories for Red Hat or CentOS, so you will need to install the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository. You can install the EPEL repository by running the following command:
    sudo yum install epel-release
  2. Install nginx and PHP5: Once you have installed the EPEL repository, you can install nginx and PHP5 by running the following command:
    sudo yum install nginx php-fpm
  3. Configure PHP-FPM: PHP-FPM is the FastCGI Process Manager for PHP. You need to configure PHP-FPM to work with nginx. Open the PHP-FPM configuration file /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf using your preferred text editor, and make the following changes:
    listen = /var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock

    Uncomment the listen line and change it to the above.

    user = nginx
    group = nginx

    Uncomment the user and group lines and set them to nginx.

  4. Configure nginx: Open the nginx configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf using your preferred text editor, and make the following changes:
    server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;

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

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

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

    Replace example.com with the hostname or IP address of your server, and set the root directive to the location of your website’s files. This configuration sets up nginx to listen on port 80 and pass PHP requests to PHP-FPM over a Unix socket.

  5. Start the nginx and PHP-FPM services: Once you have configured nginx and PHP-FPM, you can start the services using the following commands:
    sudo systemctl start nginx
    sudo systemctl start php-fpm

    You can also enable the services to start automatically at boot time using the following commands:

    sudo systemctl enable nginx
    sudo systemctl enable php-fpm

    This will ensure that nginx and PHP-FPM start automatically when the system boots.

That’s it! You should now have a working nginx web server with PHP5 and FastCGI on your Red Hat or CentOS system.

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