Setting up a good performance PHP-Stack is not a trivial work. We will need to choose which software is necessary for the stack based on some specific needs. Today I will guide how to setup nginx php-fpm 5.6 mariadb on CentOS server.

Remove out-dated softwares

[bash]yum remove -y httpd
yum remove -y mysqld
yum remove -y php-common[/bash]

Setting up repos

For PHP5.6:

[bash]rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm
rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm[/bash]

Or we can add Epel repository (rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm) and install using remi and remi-php56 repos instead of the webtatic repo.

For Nginx (/etc/yum.repos.d/nginx.repo):

[bash][nginx]
name=nginx repo
baseurl=http://nginx.org/packages/centos/$releasever/$basearch/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1[/bash]

For MariaDB (/etc/yum.repos.d/MariaDB.repo): go to MariaDB repositories to choose appropriate repo. For example, for MariaDB 5.5 on CentOS 6 32-bit:

[bash][mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/5.5/centos6-x86
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1[/bash]

Install nginx, php-fpm 5.6, mariadb

[bash]yum install -y nginx
yum install -y php56w-fpm php56w-opcache php56w-mysqlnd php56w-mcrypt php56w-mbstring php56w-cli php56w-dom
yum install -y MariaDB-server MariaDB-client[/bash]

For installing using remi and remi-php56 repos, we will need to add repoforge repo (for libmcrypt) and install package without 56w (so it will be yum install -y php-fpm php-opcache php-mysqlnd php-mcrypt php-mbstring php-cli php-dom …) as above.

Post-Configuration

1. MariaDB

• Start the service:

  [bash]service mysql start[/bash]

• Change root password:

  [bash][root@web ~]# mysql -u root
  MariaDB [(none)]> UPDATE `mysql`.`user` SET `Password` = PASSWORD(‘YOUR-NEW-PASSWORD’) WHERE `User` = ‘root’;
  MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
  MariaDB [(none)]> exit[/bash]

• If replication is needed, edit the /etc/my.cnf.d/server.cnf file. Parameter configuration is also needed to put here.

2. PHP-FPM

• Change loglevel to error in /etc/php-fpm.conf.
• Create the following folders for php-fpm to store session and also wsdlcache (can change in /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf):

  [bash]mkdir /var/lib/php/session
  chown -R apache:apache /var/lib/php/session
  mkdir /var/lib/php/wsdlcache
  chown -R apache:apache /var/lib/php/wsdlcache[/bash]

• Restart and enable service:

  [bash]service php-fpm restart
  chkconfig –add php-fpm
  chkconfig –levels 235 php-fpm on[/bash]

3. Nginx

• Create a default configuration for php-fpm (/etc/nginx/php-fpm.conf):

  [bash]location ~ \.php {
  try_files $uri = 404;
  fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
  fastcgi_index index.php;
  include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
  fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
  }[/bash]

• Create a server config file in /etc/nginx/conf.d/your-website.conf and include the above config file. Sample configuration:

  [bash]server {
  listen 80;

  root /home/yourdomain/public;
  index index.html index.htm index.php;

  server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;

  access_log off;
  error_log /var/log/nginx/yourdomain.error.log error;

  charset utf-8;

  location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|svg|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|exe|pdf|doc|xls|ppt|txt|odt|ods|odp|odf|tar|bmp|rtf|js|mp3|avi|mpeg|flv|html|htm|mp4|woff|ttf|eot)$ {
  root /home/yourdomain/public;
  expires max;
  #try_files $uri @fallback;
  }

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

  location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; }
  location = /robots.txt { log_not_found off; access_log off; }

  error_page 404 /index.php;

  #include hhvm.conf; # The HHVM Magic Here
  include php-fpm.conf;

  # Deny .htaccess file access
  location ~ /\.ht {
  deny all;
  }
  }[/bash]

• Restart service:

  [bash]service nginx restart
  chkconfig –add nginx
  chkconfig –levels 235 nginx on[/bash]

It’s all.

Troubleshooting

1. Mariadb-server is conflicted with mariadb-libs

In most case, the conflict will be with mariadb-libs. This package is required by postfix, so we can simply remove postfix and mariadb-libs before installing mariadb-server again.