I had problems with my nginx for months. I read a ton of articles online but couldn't find a solution. Most of what I saw was for php7.0
, and they used php-fpm-sock file
which clearly does not exist in php7.1
. Creating and configuring php7.1
to use the sock file
was a different kettle of fish on it's own. I failed at it several times. When I upgraded to High Sierra (which basically wiped my system clean due to multiple failures), I had to start setup all over again. I decided to take my time and actually tackle this nginx setup issue. There was still no tutorial on it that worked for me. I made up my mind to figure it out on my own. Did I? This article will explain how I did it.
If you are new to http servers on your local machine, this article would make setting up nginx pretty easy for you even if you don't understand most of the stuff. If you use LAMP or WAMP or any of that, you might want to go read up on setting up nginx for your OS before coming right here. The nginx configurations would be the same. Just the folders to find the nginx.config
file for nginx may change from OS to OS. Yes, this should work for non Mac users as well.
To make this article pretty useful to you, I'd skip a lot of stuff that are not the focus (stuff that there are probably like 1,000 articles on already). I'd speed through a lot of this. I use High Sierra on my Mac (I used Sierra before) so I cannot guarantee what would happen for other versions of macOS X. If you are following and anything is missing, do not fret. Just Google how to install it and then continue with this setup.
If you already have Nginx and PHP7.1 installed, you can skip to the installation section and head straight to configuration.
INSTALLATION
We are going to use Homebrew
for all our installations. It makes life easy and it is pretty straightforward. Click here to read about it or just install right away.
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
When you are done, ensure homebrew's environment is setup correctly.
$ brew doctor
Next we're going to install a launchctl wrapper that will stop, start, and restart any service we install with brew.
$ brew tap homebrew/services; brew tap homebrew/dupes
Let's install php7.1 with fpm and display the version after installation.
$ brew install php71 --with-fpm --without-apache; php -v; php-fpm -v
Start PHP right away.
$ brew services start php71
We would not have to setup much for PHP7.1 with FPM because it comes pretty configured right out of the box. Let's just get nginx and get the party going.
$ brew install nginx; brew services start nginx
We are done with installations for now, time for configurations. Nginx should be running on port 8080 if you also have apache installed and running. Either way, you should see which port it is running on after installation, so you can quickly visit http://localhost:8080
to see the default nginx homepage (use the port displayed in your terminal after setup instead, if it is not 8080).
THE CONFIGURATION
When installed with homebrew, Nginxβs configuration file would be found in /usr/local/etc/nginx
. Open it with any editor you like (I use nano
to save time).
We are going to leave everything the way it is and just edit only a few sections. The nginx.config
file would be configured properly upon installation to serve static files. All your websites would be in /usr/local/var/www
folder so that nginx can see them. Nginx mirrors all the files there to it's html
folder that can be found in /usr/local/Cellar/nginx/[version_number]/html
as of this writing. If you want to set a different part for your files, edit this block of the config file and set a different root
.
location / {
root html;
index index.html index.htm index.php;
}
Don't forget to add index.php
to the index
list so that nginx can automatically load that file when it serves your site.
The next thing is to setup how our php files are proxied for execution. Edit your block to match the following.
# proxy the PHP scripts to Apache listening on 127.0.0.1:80
#
# location ~ \.php$ {
# proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1;
#}
# pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
#
location ~ \.php$ {
root html;
include fastcgi.conf;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
#fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /scripts$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
I left the fastcgi_param
line commented out just incase you need to set something there later. All params are already included below it and the fastcgi.conf
file should have all the settings required to use php-fpm
. Save your file and restart nginx.
$ brew services restart nginx
If you are using multiple configuration files (all stored in /sites-available
), you would have to adjust them one by one as well. You can store this setup block above in a separate file and include it in all of them if they all use the same root folder.
Time to test our beautiful setup. Create an info.php file
in /usr/local/var/www
folder and put any php
code of your choice that should output stuff (I echoed phpinfo()
). Go to http://localhost:8080/info.php
and it should display just fine (use the port displayed in your terminal after setup if it is not 8080).
Now buddy, go enjoy your nginx and cry no more.
NGINX is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server known for its high performance, stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. If you want to see how nginx performs in handling requests and heavy usage when compared to apache, read Web server performance comparison. If you would like to understand better about the individual strengths of nginx and apache, checkout this article on Digital Ocean.
Top comments (11)
Hi, I am following this article. But when I run "brew tap homebrew/dupes". I got this error: "Error: homebrew/dupes was deprecated. This tap is now empty as all its formulae were migrated". How can I fix this? I tried to search but I do not found any solution. I am using Homebrew 1.6.4. MacOS high sierra version 10.13.4 (17E202). Thanks.
Did you find a solution? You only needed to find the replacement for homebrew/dupes
When, I have created info.php file as you suggested and when I am hitting the URL (localhost:8080/info.php) the file is getting downloaded instead of displaying details.
Can you please help me out.
I want to setup a Laravel project and run through Nginx.
Thanks in advance.
Hi Sher,
I apologise for getting to this late. This usually happens when PHP is not properly configured. Nginx isn't passing the PHP script to FPM or FPM is not processing it at all (probably not set up properly), so it is sending the file because it does not know what to do.
Also, be sure your PHP installation is not using the
.sock
file but is processing viaport 9000
. Look at/etc/php/{PHP_VERSION}/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
and be sure what it is listening to sock file: prnt.sc/s2dr4p orport 9000
: prnt.sc/s2dvdv. It may also be in/etc/php/{PHP_VERSION}/php-fpm.d/www.conf
depending on your installation. Just find it.Let me know if you have found a solution for it.
about fastcgi_param , not sure about the default is not work. But this config will work
This was pretty much useless, it still didn't work for many reasons.
Thanks for trying
Now I have to cry
What result did you get at the end of the day?
I mean, I wrote this about 1 year ago, so a lot might have changed since then.
Nonetheless, share what didn't work let me see if I can help.
Hi Valentine!
Thanks for replying.
I might found a solutions that now works. It took me three days to reach there. Now the only thing I have left is to make a websocket proxy works properly with SSL.
You're right things seems to happens very rapidly. There are many non up to date articles out there that sometimes confusing a bit.
Your solution might work indeed if I had the pleasure to be use a new fresh sierra. But that was unfortunate not the case. I have been sort of messing up a few configurations, packages, not update, miss to set permissions, right user etc.
But now that is in right place/order.
The only thing I have left is to setup a properly websocket proxy to sort of prevent expose ports for the end-user. Here is what it looks like:
Thanks for helping , very kind of you!
(note: everything working and SSL cert and php, permissions, etc.
But now I also have a node-js-server that is up and running correctly. the DNS mydomain.com is a changed host DNS, so its not live or real!
It points to localhost/127.0.0.1 in the hostfile on my machine, but that should work too).
I'm crying nevertheless :'(
Dude...
Thanks.
This was a huge help even in 2023, thank you!!