Nginx + PHP + MySQL on Windows in 6 minutes

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come from http://eksith.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/nginx-php-mysql-windows/3/




The last time I posted a tutorial on Nginx, there wasn’t a native port of the server available. Riez Opuz posted a link to his Xenstack project on that post that prompted me to write the rest of what I’ve been putting off. It’s a good way to tweak the stack to your own needs.

I tried to leave this as “in 5 minutes”, but then I remembered how long it would take to download MySQL… Even on broadband.

Kevin Worthington had very kindly provided a Cygwin build that ran on Windows, however Nginx now has a Windows build that we can use and this time, we can add MySQL to the list as well. To keep everything compatible, we’ll be using the 32 bit versions for all downloads.

Once you’ve also downloaded Nginx (0.8.53 at the time of this post), head on to the PHP libraries and remember to download the Windows Libraries only (5.3.3 as of today) and select the thread safe version. The first steps are the same with the exception of the download link to MySQL and we need the no-install download.

Make sure to follow this directory structure!

Extract the Nginx files to C:\nginx
Extract PHP to C:\nginx\php
Extract MySQL to C:\nginx\mysql

First, let’s configure MySQL

MySQL no-install is a freakin’ huge download so feel free to delete mysql-test, Embedded, sql-bench and folders named debug once unzipped. If you want to minimize the folder even more, you can optionally delete any .pdb files. This would come in handy if you want to deploy the whole ensamble on a thumb drive or package it for a demo application and are really penny-pinching the available storage space.

Once the cleanup is complete, copy my-medium.ini in C:\nginx\mysql\ into my.ini. I think the medium configuration takes care of most uses and, for a moderately busy site, it fares pretty well.

Always try to copy exising files before making changes instead of outright renaming them. This way, if something goes wrong with the new configuration, we still have the original handy to start over..

Open up the newly copied my.ini file and change the [client] block to match the following.


[client]
#password= your_password
port= 3306
socket= c:/nginx/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock
Note the Unix style forward-slashes.

Now in the [mysqld] block in the same file, change to match the following :


[mysqld]
port= 3306
socket= c:/nginx/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock
basedir= c:/nginx/mysql
datadir= c:/nginx/mysql/data
bind-address= localhost
enable-named-pipe
skip-external-locking
key_buffer_size = 16M
max_allowed_packet = 1M
table_open_cache = 64
sort_buffer_size = 512K
net_buffer_length = 8K
read_buffer_size = 256K
read_rnd_buffer_size = 512K
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 8M
Now let’s try and run our MySQL server

Start a new command line window…
Note: If you’re running Windows Vista or above with UAC enabled, you need to right click on the command line link and select “Run as administrator”.. If you get a message saying “Install/Remove of the Service Denied!” when trying to start MySQL later on, then you probably have UAC running, so this step is very important.

Navigate to C:\nginx\mysql\bin\ and run :

mysqld --install-manual
There should be a slight delay followed by a “Service successfully installed”. We then must run :

net start mysql
…And if there are no errors noted, then Congratulations!

Before we proceed, we need to run some housekeeping operations. In the same command line window, run :

mysqladmin -u root password newpassword
Where newpassword is your new MySQL root password. This is an important step toward securing your installation.

Now that we’ve changed our root password enter the following :

mysql -u root -p
Which will give you a password prompt. Enter your newpassword created before. Once you’re logged in, you’re at the MySQL console.

If you need to change your root password at a future date, run mysql as above type the following :

update mysql.user set password=PASSWORD('new-newpassword') where user='root';
Note that passwords are encoded before storage in the database, so we need to run the PASSWORD function on our new-newpassword. Once that’s done, be sure to run :

flush privileges;
Now we need to remove all the junk that came with the server.

Delete the test databases and anonymous users (Always remember the semicolon at the end!) :

delete from mysql.user where user='root' and host!='localhost';
drop database test;
delete from mysql.db where db='test' or db='test\_%';
And finally flush privileges and quit :

flush privileges; quit;
Now if we need to, we can stop MySQL by running the following (in C:\nginx\mysql\bin\ as an Administrator of course):

net stop mysql
And if we need to remove it from our services entirely, run the following :

mysqld --remove

Setting up PHP with Nginx

In our previous example, we setup PHP with Nginx’s fast-cgi capability.

This example is essentially the same with some minor alterations…

Navigate to C:\nginx\php, copy and rename php.ini-production to php.ini.

In this php.ini file, scroll down to (or hit Ctrl + F to find in Notepad) extension_dir = “ext”. Remove the semicolon in front uncomment this line.

Now scroll down to the “Windows Extensions” section and uncomment the following lines :

extension=php_bz2.dll
extension=php_gd2.dll
extension=php_imap.dll
extension=php_mbstring.dll
extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll
Also change the include path location :

include_path = "c:\php\PEAR"
This is in case you want to install any PEAR modules (which can be frankly annoying at times), you just need to download, extract and copy to the PEAR folder.

I think these extensions would be required for functional content management which, I imagine, is the reason you’re reading a post on installing MySQL with Nginx and PHP in the first place.

And finally, uncomment the following line :

log_errors = On
After these changes are done, we can finally get into the the Nginx configuration…

Setup Nginx

In C:\nginx\conf\ copy nginx.conf as a backup and edit the original. Find the following lines, uncomment them and change the fastcgi_param :

location ~ \.php$ {
roothtml;
fastcgi_pass127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_indexindex.php;
fastcgi_paramSCRIPT_FILENAME$document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
includefastcgi_params;
}
I modified this bit from an absolute path of the html folder to $document_root, which is a better way to do things.

Update Feb 26, 2012 for HaKi’s concern about uploaded executions

If you have an upload directory on your server, it’s best to avoid any PHP executions on any uploaded files.
E.G :


location /uploads {
if $request_uri ~ \.php$ {return 403;}
}
And that should be it for the configuration…

Starting your server

In the last post, there were two bat files included in Kevin’s distribution for starting and stopping the server. We’ll need to create both of these in notepad this time, since this is from the original developers, and enter some startup and shutdown code.

Create a start-server.vbs file and enter the following :


Dim sh, fcgiPort, PHPini

fcgiPort = "127.0.0.1:9000"
PHPini = "c:\nginx\php\php.ini"

Set sh = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

' Navigate to the the nginx folder and run the server
sh.run "cmd /K CD C:\nginx\ & start nginx", 0

' Navigate to the PHP folder and start the FastCGI executable
sh.run "cmd /K CD C:\nginx\php\ & php-cgi.exe -b "& fcgiPort &" -c "& PHPini, 0

' Navigate to MySQL and start
sh.run "cmd /k CD C:\nginx\mysql\bin\ & mysqld", 0

Set sh = Nothing
(It’s times like this, I realise how much I’ve been away from VB)

Now that we can start our services, we also need a way to stop them. Create a stop-server.vbs and enter the following :


Dim sh, fcgiPort, PHPini

Set sh = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

' Navigate to the the nginx folder and shut it down
sh.run "cmd /K CD C:\nginx\ & nginx -s quit", 0

' Shutdown PHP FastCGI
sh.run "cmd taskkill /f /IM php-cgi.exe", 0

' Navigate to MySQL and shutdown the server
sh.run "cmd /k CD C:\nginx\mysql\bin\ & mysqladmin -u root shutdown", 0

Set sh = Nothing
And that should be it!