<![CDATA[Admin Reference - All Forums]]> http://www.adminreference.com/ Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:06:08 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Useful (And Uncommon) Commands]]> http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=12 Fri, 25 Nov 2011 04:10:43 +0000 http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=12
Soo basically, post any useful commands you find.. List the operating system(s), the command, what it does, and an example. Ill start

Command: aspell
Operating System(s): Linux/Unix
Description: Command line spell checker.
Example:
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# cat test.txt
Welcome to Admin Reference! This is a mispeled word
[root@svr1 ~]# aspell -c test.txt
[root@svr1 ~]# cat test.txt
Welcome to Admin Reference! This is a misspelled word

Here's what the interface looks like
Code:
Welcome to Admin Reference! This is a mispeled word

1) misspelled                           6) misruled
2) misapplied                           7) mislead
3) misled                               8) spelled
4) dispelled                            9) spieled
5) misfiled                             0) misplaced
i) Ignore                               I) Ignore all
r) Replace                              R) Replace all
a) Add                                  l) Add Lower
b) Abort                                x) Exit

>
]]>
Soo basically, post any useful commands you find.. List the operating system(s), the command, what it does, and an example. Ill start

Command: aspell
Operating System(s): Linux/Unix
Description: Command line spell checker.
Example:
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# cat test.txt
Welcome to Admin Reference! This is a mispeled word
[root@svr1 ~]# aspell -c test.txt
[root@svr1 ~]# cat test.txt
Welcome to Admin Reference! This is a misspelled word

Here's what the interface looks like
Code:
Welcome to Admin Reference! This is a mispeled word

1) misspelled                           6) misruled
2) misapplied                           7) mislead
3) misled                               8) spelled
4) dispelled                            9) spieled
5) misfiled                             0) misplaced
i) Ignore                               I) Ignore all
r) Replace                              R) Replace all
a) Add                                  l) Add Lower
b) Abort                                x) Exit

>
]]> <![CDATA[Welcome back to AR!]]> http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=11 Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:35:39 +0000 http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=11
After many months of being down we are finally back up and rocking. We ran into a few snags here and there and decided to have a nice clean, and fresh start. There have been a few people who asked Justin and Myself why we decided to start a forum, and the answer is quite simple. When we're working day to day and learning new things we typically scatter our notes and guides all throughout our computers, external drives and various notes websites and really wanted a general location to put our guides so not only do we have a single place to go to, to see them, but also to share our knowledge with those who are in need.

We also love to help out newcomers to various technologies that we know, and even though we are far from being experts in certain fields we definitely believe that we can help out and guide those in the right direction and I feel the community that we can build here will be amazingly helpful.

We have many things planned for here, and we hope you would like to join us on our journey and perhaps we all can share our knowledge with each other.

Once again, welcome to the new and improved Admin Reference forums.]]>
After many months of being down we are finally back up and rocking. We ran into a few snags here and there and decided to have a nice clean, and fresh start. There have been a few people who asked Justin and Myself why we decided to start a forum, and the answer is quite simple. When we're working day to day and learning new things we typically scatter our notes and guides all throughout our computers, external drives and various notes websites and really wanted a general location to put our guides so not only do we have a single place to go to, to see them, but also to share our knowledge with those who are in need.

We also love to help out newcomers to various technologies that we know, and even though we are far from being experts in certain fields we definitely believe that we can help out and guide those in the right direction and I feel the community that we can build here will be amazingly helpful.

We have many things planned for here, and we hope you would like to join us on our journey and perhaps we all can share our knowledge with each other.

Once again, welcome to the new and improved Admin Reference forums.]]> <![CDATA[Beginner's Guide to Git]]> http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=10 Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:28:00 +0000 http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=10
1) Installing Git

Installing Git should be very easy to do, and it all depends on the distro that you're using, but typically all distros have git in their standard repositiories.

Here is how you can install it on these two popular distros:

CentOS
Code:
sudo yum install git

Ubuntu
Code:
sudo apt-get install git-core

Or if you would prefer, you can manually download it and install it from here

2) Creating a Repository
Once you have installed Git on your system, you then can create a local Git repository, and use that or like I will show you in this tutorial, you can use an external server to store your code. In this tutorial we will use github.com to store our code, and they will do it for free if you are an open source project.

So I would head over to github, and then once you're logged in you will want to create a repository and name it whatever you would like and then after that this is all you would do (which these instructions are given to you on github as well). After you have created your repository, you will want to add your SSH Public Key to allow you to push and pull without a password, this is optional of course. To do this you would navigate to Account Settings --> SSH Public Keys.

Then you will need to set up and configure git to use your username and email address so you would do:

Code:
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email youremail@domain.com

Then you will want to create the directory to set up your repository, in this case my repository name is "artest" so I will do the following:

Code:
mkdir artest
cd artest
git init
touch README
git add README
git commit -m 'first commit'
git remote add origin git@github.com:<USERNAME>/<REPONAME>.git
git push -u origin master

Then you're done setting up the repository. You can skip all of the above if you are just going to pull and contribute to an existing repository, and here is how you can do that.

3) Using Git

Grabbing the files
If you don't already have the files on your local machine, you can grab them by using the following:

Code:
git clone (URL, ie git://github.com/github/linux-2.6.git)


Then you can make your modifications to the file(s), and then to apply your changes to the repository (if you have write access). After you modify a file you will need to add that file to be committed.

Add a file/directory to be committed:

Code:
git add <file/directory>

Then once you have added all of your files you can do:

Code:
git commit -m "My message letting me know the changes that I have done"

Once you've added the file(s) or directories and committed them to your local repo, you then can push your changes to the external server with:

Code:
git push

Other useful commands

A command that I personally use frequently is:

Code:
git status

This will provide you a list of files that have been modified and tell you if they have been added to your commits or not. This quickly lets me know what I am missing or what is actually going to be pushed when I do it.


Here is a great website as well to get more commands if you wish to dig in further.

Quote:http://gitref.org

I'll continue to update this, so keep checking back!]]>
1) Installing Git

Installing Git should be very easy to do, and it all depends on the distro that you're using, but typically all distros have git in their standard repositiories.

Here is how you can install it on these two popular distros:

CentOS
Code:
sudo yum install git

Ubuntu
Code:
sudo apt-get install git-core

Or if you would prefer, you can manually download it and install it from here

2) Creating a Repository
Once you have installed Git on your system, you then can create a local Git repository, and use that or like I will show you in this tutorial, you can use an external server to store your code. In this tutorial we will use github.com to store our code, and they will do it for free if you are an open source project.

So I would head over to github, and then once you're logged in you will want to create a repository and name it whatever you would like and then after that this is all you would do (which these instructions are given to you on github as well). After you have created your repository, you will want to add your SSH Public Key to allow you to push and pull without a password, this is optional of course. To do this you would navigate to Account Settings --> SSH Public Keys.

Then you will need to set up and configure git to use your username and email address so you would do:

Code:
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email youremail@domain.com

Then you will want to create the directory to set up your repository, in this case my repository name is "artest" so I will do the following:

Code:
mkdir artest
cd artest
git init
touch README
git add README
git commit -m 'first commit'
git remote add origin git@github.com:<USERNAME>/<REPONAME>.git
git push -u origin master

Then you're done setting up the repository. You can skip all of the above if you are just going to pull and contribute to an existing repository, and here is how you can do that.

3) Using Git

Grabbing the files
If you don't already have the files on your local machine, you can grab them by using the following:

Code:
git clone (URL, ie git://github.com/github/linux-2.6.git)


Then you can make your modifications to the file(s), and then to apply your changes to the repository (if you have write access). After you modify a file you will need to add that file to be committed.

Add a file/directory to be committed:

Code:
git add <file/directory>

Then once you have added all of your files you can do:

Code:
git commit -m "My message letting me know the changes that I have done"

Once you've added the file(s) or directories and committed them to your local repo, you then can push your changes to the external server with:

Code:
git push

Other useful commands

A command that I personally use frequently is:

Code:
git status

This will provide you a list of files that have been modified and tell you if they have been added to your commits or not. This quickly lets me know what I am missing or what is actually going to be pushed when I do it.


Here is a great website as well to get more commands if you wish to dig in further.

Quote:http://gitref.org

I'll continue to update this, so keep checking back!]]> <![CDATA[Creating an SSL vhost in Nginx]]> http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=9 Sun, 20 Nov 2011 03:30:22 +0000 http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=9 this thread first.

1) Creating a Self Signed Certificate
NOTE: If you have a certificate already, then you can skip this step and go on to step #2
First, make sure you have openssl installed.
Quote:# sudo yum -y install openssl
Now you can use openssl to create your certificate!

a) Generate the 1024 bit RSA key, Im going to call this one AR.key, but you can name it whatever you want.
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# sudo openssl genrsa -out AR.key 1024
Generating RSA private key, 1024 bit long modulus
...........................................................++++++
....................++++++
e is 65537 (0x10001)

b) Using the .key file we made, we can now create a Certificate Signing Request, such as below..
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# openssl req -new -key AR.key -out AR.csr
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:Arizona
Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:Phoenix
Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Admin Reference
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Tech
Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:www.adminreference.com
Email Address []:admin@adminreference.com

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:password
An optional company name []:

c) Finally, generate the certificate, using the .csr and the .key file.
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in AR.csr -signkey AR.key -out AR.crt
Signature ok
subject=/C=US/ST=Arizona/L=Phoenix/O=Admin Reference/OU=Tech/CN=www.adminreference.com/emailAddress=admin@adminreference.com
Getting Private key

DONE! I created the directory /etc/nginx/ssl/ and moved all my certificate related files into that, but you can really put them wherever you want.

2) Implementing the Certificate
So basically, all you need to do is copy the non-ssl configuration file, then change "listen 80;" to "listen 443;", then in the same "server" section, add the following:
Quote:ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.key;


So the end result should look like this (Not going to go over the details of all the other settings, that would be in the other tutorial:
PHP Code:
server {
    set $domain "adminreference.com";
    listen       443;
    server_name  $domain www.$domain;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.key;

    if ( $host !~ "^www.(.*)" ) {    
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.$domain/$1 permanent;
    }

    access_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-access_log";
    #error_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-error_log";

    location / {
        # Uncomment the following to enable basic authentication
        #auth_basic "Restricted";
        #auth_basic_user_file "/www/$domain/htpasswd";
        
        allow all;
        root /www/$domain/htdocs/;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;
    }
    
        
        
        
    location ~ \.php$ {
            root           /www/$domain/htdocs/;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

} 
]]> this thread first.

1) Creating a Self Signed Certificate
NOTE: If you have a certificate already, then you can skip this step and go on to step #2
First, make sure you have openssl installed.
Quote:# sudo yum -y install openssl
Now you can use openssl to create your certificate!

a) Generate the 1024 bit RSA key, Im going to call this one AR.key, but you can name it whatever you want.
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# sudo openssl genrsa -out AR.key 1024
Generating RSA private key, 1024 bit long modulus
...........................................................++++++
....................++++++
e is 65537 (0x10001)

b) Using the .key file we made, we can now create a Certificate Signing Request, such as below..
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# openssl req -new -key AR.key -out AR.csr
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:Arizona
Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:Phoenix
Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Admin Reference
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Tech
Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:www.adminreference.com
Email Address []:admin@adminreference.com

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:password
An optional company name []:

c) Finally, generate the certificate, using the .csr and the .key file.
Quote:[root@svr1 ~]# openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in AR.csr -signkey AR.key -out AR.crt
Signature ok
subject=/C=US/ST=Arizona/L=Phoenix/O=Admin Reference/OU=Tech/CN=www.adminreference.com/emailAddress=admin@adminreference.com
Getting Private key

DONE! I created the directory /etc/nginx/ssl/ and moved all my certificate related files into that, but you can really put them wherever you want.

2) Implementing the Certificate
So basically, all you need to do is copy the non-ssl configuration file, then change "listen 80;" to "listen 443;", then in the same "server" section, add the following:
Quote:ssl on;
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.key;


So the end result should look like this (Not going to go over the details of all the other settings, that would be in the other tutorial:
PHP Code:
server {
    set $domain "adminreference.com";
    listen       443;
    server_name  $domain www.$domain;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/AR.key;

    if ( $host !~ "^www.(.*)" ) {    
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.$domain/$1 permanent;
    }

    access_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-access_log";
    #error_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-error_log";

    location / {
        # Uncomment the following to enable basic authentication
        #auth_basic "Restricted";
        #auth_basic_user_file "/www/$domain/htpasswd";
        
        allow all;
        root /www/$domain/htdocs/;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;
    }
    
        
        
        
    location ~ \.php$ {
            root           /www/$domain/htdocs/;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

} 
]]> <![CDATA[Setting up Nginx on Centos 5.x (With PHP)]]> http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=1 Sun, 13 Nov 2011 02:56:58 +0000 http://www.adminreference.com/showthread.php?tid=1 Nginx instead of Apache. It was a very quick install, and I can already tell you already that I love it.

Why nginx? http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Apache_vs_nginx

I figured it might be a good idea to write up a quick install tutorial for it, just to give you an idea of how it works and how easy it is to use, just to give you an idea if you would rather use nginx over apache for your next web server.

NOTE: In all examples/scripts/configs below, im using adminreference.com for an example domain.

We are using Centos 5.x on our server, hence we are using YUM for the install, but I'm sure that other than that, it's not a very different setup than any other *nix based systems.

1) INSTALL
I installed nginx with yum and just importing the RPM into my repository, if you choose to use this approach, then the command to execute is..
Quote:rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/ep...#36;(uname -i)/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
NOTE: The version may change, so if that fails, then open that URL up in your web browser and look for the latest epel-release-#-#.noarch.rpm listed.

If you wish to add the repository to your system, you can do that too. I would look through the nginx website for the instructions: http://wiki.nginx.org/Install

Now just use yum, and then chkconfig it to make sure it starts up when you reboot the server
Quote:sudo yum -y install nginx
sudo chkconfig nginx start

2) CONFIGURE NGINX
Heres the fun part. One of the reasons I like nginx over apache, is just the config. It's so much cleaner, easier to read and configure. Im not a fan of XML based config files (lighthttpd) or the format that apache uses.

Heres the default configuration file, just to give you a taste of what the configs look like.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ sudo cat /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.default | egrep -v "#|^$"
worker_processes  1;
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}
http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;
        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }
} 
Using that configuration will setup a basic virtualhost that you can view by just going to the IP via your web browser, and see the default nginx configuration file.

Now heres my configuration file
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ sudo cat /etc/nginx/nginx.conf | egrep -v "#|^$"
user              nginx;
worker_processes  1;
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}
http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    gzip  on;
    
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/configs-enabled/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-enabled/*.conf;
} 

The 3 main differences you will see is the gzip I added for gzip compression, which helps with the load times, and the two includes at the bottom.

The reason behind these includes are basically just to clean up the directory structure, and make adding/editing/enabling/disabling configurations and virtual hosts very quick and easy. It's a pretty popular method, but I will explain it anyways, if you already know what this is, just skip to the next section of this tutorial.

Here is the directory structure that I setup for the vhosts and configuration files.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ ls -l /etc/nginx/conf.d/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 05:47 configs-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 05:46 configs-enabled
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 13 04:27 sites-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 07:17 sites-enabled 
Reason being, is now I can add .conf files to configs-available and sites-available, then simply symlink them into the configs-enabled and sites-enabled directories.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ ls -l /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-enabled
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 57 Nov 11 05:50 adminreference.com.conf -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/adminreference.com.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 Nov 11 05:50 ssl.conf -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/ssl.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Nov 11 05:50 virtual.conf -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/virtual.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 54 Nov 11 05:50 virtualhost.template -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/virtualhost.template 
To symlink a configuration file, just..
PHP Code:
sudo ln -s -v /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/configuration.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-enabled/configuration.conf || exit 1 
Pretty simple right? This is common practice for a lot of web server configuration file structures.

3) CONFIGURE PHP
Using YUM..
Quote:sudo yum install php-pear-Net-Socket php-pear php-common php-gd php-devel php php-mbstring php-pear-Mail php-cli php-imap php-snmp php-pdo php-xml php-pear-Auth-SASL php-ldap php-pear-Net-SMTP php-mysql
Now make sure it got installed properly..
Quote:[J@svr1 ~]$ php-cgi -v
PHP 5.1.6 (cgi-fcgi) (built: Nov 29 2010 16:43:56)
Copyright © 1997-2006 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright © 1998-2006 Zend Technologies

Now you need to add the php_cgi init.d script to get it started properly. I found a decent one on the web, but it had a few flaws, so I took the liberty of modifying it a bit and uploading it to the server. Download/install it using:
Quote:wget http://www.adminreference.com/scripts/nginx/php_cgi.txt -O /etc/init.d/php_cgi
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/php_cgi
sudo chkconfig php_cgi on
sudo /etc/init.d/php_cgi start

If the above fails due to not having spawn-fcgi installed, you can run the following commands to install that as well.
Quote:wget http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttp...18.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf lighttpd-1.4.18.tar.bz2
cd lighttpd-1.4.18/
./configure
make
sudo cp src/spawn-fcgi /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
sudo +x /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi

After thats done, you can delete the downloaded content:
Quote:cd ..
rm -rf lighttpd-1.4.18/
rm lighttpd-1.4.18.tar.bz2

4) ADD A VHOST
Heres the configuration file for AR at the time this tutorial was written.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ sudo cat /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/adminreference.com.conf
# HOST: adminreference.com
# DATE: Thu Nov 10 03:39:15 MST 2011
#

server {
    set $domain "adminreference.com";
    listen       80;
    server_name  $domain www.$domain;

    if ( $host !~ "^www.(.*)" ) {    
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.$domain/$1 permanent;
    }

    access_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-access_log";
    #error_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-error_log";

    location / {
        #allow all;
        auth_basic "Restricted";
        auth_basic_user_file "/www/$domain/htpasswd";
        root /www/$domain/htdocs/;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;
    }
    
    location ~ \.php$ {
            root           /www/$domain/htdocs/;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

} 
I like the fact that you can use if statements and set variables in the configuration files makes life so much easier...

With the above configuration, the new vhost is setup like so..
  • Error Log: /www/adminreference.com/logs/adminreference.om-error_log (which is a symlink to /var/log/nginx/adminreference.om-error_log)
  • Access Log: Same as the error log, only access_log
  • Restricted access to all .ht* files (.htaccess, .htpasswd, etc)
  • Setup a 301 redirect from non-www to www
  • Enabled PHP for the vhost
  • Set the default pages to index.php index.html index.htm (in that order)
  • etc, I think you can understand it from the configuration file itself

5) DONE!
Thats pretty much it, you can now test the configurations and reload nginx by running:
Quote:sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

Now to make life easier, I created a simple bash script that will automatically add a new vhost, you can download it by running:
Quote:wget http://www.adminreference.com/scripts/ng...ite.sh.txt -O create_nginx_site.sh
You will also need the template file..
Quote:wget http://www.adminreference.com/scripts/ng...mplate.txt -O virtualhost.template

Heres the sample output:
Quote:sudo /bin/bash create_nginx_site.sh -h google.com
`/etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/virtualhost.template' -> `/etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/google.com.conf'
mkdir: created directory `/www/google.com'
mkdir: created directory `/www/google.com/htdocs'
create symbolic link `/www/google.com/logs' to `/var/log/nginx'
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/htdocs/index.php' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/htdocs' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/logs' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com' to nginx:nginx
mode of `/www/google.com' retained as 0755 (rwxr-xr-x)
mode of `/www/google.com/htdocs' retained as 0755 (rwxr-xr-x)
mode of `/www/google.com/htdocs/index.php' changed to 0755 (rwxr-xr-x)
neither symbolic link `/www/google.com/logs' nor referent has been changed
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/logs/google.com-access_log' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/logs/google.com-error_log' to nginx:nginx
the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
Reloading nginx: [ OK ]
Nginx reloaded! Everyting looks good
The script will..
  • Copy/rename the template to the sites-available directory
  • Create the www directory and htdocs directory
  • Symlink the logs to /var/log/nginx
  • Change ownerships to nginx and perms to rwxr-xr-x
  • Create the access and error log
  • Create a sample php page for php test (/php.php)
  • Check the configuration and then reload nginx

Thats it! If you run into any bugs, please let me know so I can update the tutorial]]> Nginx instead of Apache. It was a very quick install, and I can already tell you already that I love it.

Why nginx? http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/Apache_vs_nginx

I figured it might be a good idea to write up a quick install tutorial for it, just to give you an idea of how it works and how easy it is to use, just to give you an idea if you would rather use nginx over apache for your next web server.

NOTE: In all examples/scripts/configs below, im using adminreference.com for an example domain.

We are using Centos 5.x on our server, hence we are using YUM for the install, but I'm sure that other than that, it's not a very different setup than any other *nix based systems.

1) INSTALL
I installed nginx with yum and just importing the RPM into my repository, if you choose to use this approach, then the command to execute is..
Quote:rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/ep...#36;(uname -i)/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
NOTE: The version may change, so if that fails, then open that URL up in your web browser and look for the latest epel-release-#-#.noarch.rpm listed.

If you wish to add the repository to your system, you can do that too. I would look through the nginx website for the instructions: http://wiki.nginx.org/Install

Now just use yum, and then chkconfig it to make sure it starts up when you reboot the server
Quote:sudo yum -y install nginx
sudo chkconfig nginx start

2) CONFIGURE NGINX
Heres the fun part. One of the reasons I like nginx over apache, is just the config. It's so much cleaner, easier to read and configure. Im not a fan of XML based config files (lighthttpd) or the format that apache uses.

Heres the default configuration file, just to give you a taste of what the configs look like.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ sudo cat /etc/nginx/nginx.conf.default | egrep -v "#|^$"
worker_processes  1;
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}
http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;
        location / {
            root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   html;
        }
    }
} 
Using that configuration will setup a basic virtualhost that you can view by just going to the IP via your web browser, and see the default nginx configuration file.

Now heres my configuration file
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ sudo cat /etc/nginx/nginx.conf | egrep -v "#|^$"
user              nginx;
worker_processes  1;
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}
http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;
    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;
    gzip  on;
    
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/configs-enabled/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-enabled/*.conf;
} 

The 3 main differences you will see is the gzip I added for gzip compression, which helps with the load times, and the two includes at the bottom.

The reason behind these includes are basically just to clean up the directory structure, and make adding/editing/enabling/disabling configurations and virtual hosts very quick and easy. It's a pretty popular method, but I will explain it anyways, if you already know what this is, just skip to the next section of this tutorial.

Here is the directory structure that I setup for the vhosts and configuration files.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ ls -l /etc/nginx/conf.d/
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 05:47 configs-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 05:46 configs-enabled
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 13 04:27 sites-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 11 07:17 sites-enabled 
Reason being, is now I can add .conf files to configs-available and sites-available, then simply symlink them into the configs-enabled and sites-enabled directories.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ ls -l /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-enabled
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 57 Nov 11 05:50 adminreference.com.conf -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/adminreference.com.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 Nov 11 05:50 ssl.conf -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/ssl.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 46 Nov 11 05:50 virtual.conf -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/virtual.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 54 Nov 11 05:50 virtualhost.template -> /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/virtualhost.template 
To symlink a configuration file, just..
PHP Code:
sudo ln -s -v /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/configuration.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-enabled/configuration.conf || exit 1 
Pretty simple right? This is common practice for a lot of web server configuration file structures.

3) CONFIGURE PHP
Using YUM..
Quote:sudo yum install php-pear-Net-Socket php-pear php-common php-gd php-devel php php-mbstring php-pear-Mail php-cli php-imap php-snmp php-pdo php-xml php-pear-Auth-SASL php-ldap php-pear-Net-SMTP php-mysql
Now make sure it got installed properly..
Quote:[J@svr1 ~]$ php-cgi -v
PHP 5.1.6 (cgi-fcgi) (built: Nov 29 2010 16:43:56)
Copyright © 1997-2006 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.1.0, Copyright © 1998-2006 Zend Technologies

Now you need to add the php_cgi init.d script to get it started properly. I found a decent one on the web, but it had a few flaws, so I took the liberty of modifying it a bit and uploading it to the server. Download/install it using:
Quote:wget http://www.adminreference.com/scripts/nginx/php_cgi.txt -O /etc/init.d/php_cgi
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/php_cgi
sudo chkconfig php_cgi on
sudo /etc/init.d/php_cgi start

If the above fails due to not having spawn-fcgi installed, you can run the following commands to install that as well.
Quote:wget http://www.lighttpd.net/download/lighttp...18.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf lighttpd-1.4.18.tar.bz2
cd lighttpd-1.4.18/
./configure
make
sudo cp src/spawn-fcgi /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi
sudo +x /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi

After thats done, you can delete the downloaded content:
Quote:cd ..
rm -rf lighttpd-1.4.18/
rm lighttpd-1.4.18.tar.bz2

4) ADD A VHOST
Heres the configuration file for AR at the time this tutorial was written.
PHP Code:
[J@svr1 ~]$ sudo cat /etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/adminreference.com.conf
# HOST: adminreference.com
# DATE: Thu Nov 10 03:39:15 MST 2011
#

server {
    set $domain "adminreference.com";
    listen       80;
    server_name  $domain www.$domain;

    if ( $host !~ "^www.(.*)" ) {    
        rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://www.$domain/$1 permanent;
    }

    access_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-access_log";
    #error_log "/www/$domain/logs/$domain-error_log";

    location / {
        #allow all;
        auth_basic "Restricted";
        auth_basic_user_file "/www/$domain/htpasswd";
        root /www/$domain/htdocs/;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;
    }
    
    location ~ \.php$ {
            root           /www/$domain/htdocs/;
            fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }

} 
I like the fact that you can use if statements and set variables in the configuration files makes life so much easier...

With the above configuration, the new vhost is setup like so..
  • Error Log: /www/adminreference.com/logs/adminreference.om-error_log (which is a symlink to /var/log/nginx/adminreference.om-error_log)
  • Access Log: Same as the error log, only access_log
  • Restricted access to all .ht* files (.htaccess, .htpasswd, etc)
  • Setup a 301 redirect from non-www to www
  • Enabled PHP for the vhost
  • Set the default pages to index.php index.html index.htm (in that order)
  • etc, I think you can understand it from the configuration file itself

5) DONE!
Thats pretty much it, you can now test the configurations and reload nginx by running:
Quote:sudo /etc/init.d/nginx reload

Now to make life easier, I created a simple bash script that will automatically add a new vhost, you can download it by running:
Quote:wget http://www.adminreference.com/scripts/ng...ite.sh.txt -O create_nginx_site.sh
You will also need the template file..
Quote:wget http://www.adminreference.com/scripts/ng...mplate.txt -O virtualhost.template

Heres the sample output:
Quote:sudo /bin/bash create_nginx_site.sh -h google.com
`/etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/virtualhost.template' -> `/etc/nginx/conf.d/sites-available/google.com.conf'
mkdir: created directory `/www/google.com'
mkdir: created directory `/www/google.com/htdocs'
create symbolic link `/www/google.com/logs' to `/var/log/nginx'
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/htdocs/index.php' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/htdocs' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/logs' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com' to nginx:nginx
mode of `/www/google.com' retained as 0755 (rwxr-xr-x)
mode of `/www/google.com/htdocs' retained as 0755 (rwxr-xr-x)
mode of `/www/google.com/htdocs/index.php' changed to 0755 (rwxr-xr-x)
neither symbolic link `/www/google.com/logs' nor referent has been changed
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/logs/google.com-access_log' to nginx:nginx
changed ownership of `/www/google.com/logs/google.com-error_log' to nginx:nginx
the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful
Reloading nginx: [ OK ]
Nginx reloaded! Everyting looks good
The script will..
  • Copy/rename the template to the sites-available directory
  • Create the www directory and htdocs directory
  • Symlink the logs to /var/log/nginx
  • Change ownerships to nginx and perms to rwxr-xr-x
  • Create the access and error log
  • Create a sample php page for php test (/php.php)
  • Check the configuration and then reload nginx

Thats it! If you run into any bugs, please let me know so I can update the tutorial]]>