Making it Easier to Spawn php-cgi on Debian and Ubuntu

Apache is a great web server, but sometimes I need something a bit more lightweight. I already have a bunch of sites using lighttpd, but I’m planning on switching them to nginx. Both nginx and lighttpd use FastCGI for running PHP. Getting FastCGI up and running on Ubuntu (or Debian) involves a bit of manual work which can slow down deployment.

The normal process to get nginx and php-cgi up and running is to install the spawn-fcgi package, create a shell script such as /usr/local/bin/php-fastcgi to launch it, then a custom init script, after making both of these executable you need to run update-rc.d then finally should be right to go. Each of these manual steps increases the likelihood of mistakes being made.

Instead, I created a deb contains a configurable init script. It is pretty simple, the init script calls spawn-fcgi with the appropriate arguments. All of the configuration is handled in /etc/default/php-fastcgi. The main config options are:

• ENABLED - Enable (or disable) the init script. default: 0 (disabled)
• ADDRESS - The IP address to bind to. default: 127.0.0.1
• PORT - The TCP Port to bind to. default: 9000
• USER - The user the php scripts will be excuted as. default: www-data
• GROUP - The group the php scripts will be executed as. default: www-data
• PHP_CGI - The full path to the php-cgi binary. default: /usr/bin/php5-cgi

The last 3 variables are not in the defaults file as I didn’t think many users would want/need to change them, feel free to add them in if you need them.

Once you have set ENABLED to 1, launch the init scipt by executing sudo /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start. To check that it is running run sudo netstat -nplt | grep 9000 and you should see /usr/bin/php5-cgi listed. Now you can continue to configure your webserver.

The package depends on php5-cgi and spawn-fcgi, which is available in Debian testing/squeeze, unstable/sid, along with Ubuntu karmic and lucid. For earlier versions of ubuntu you can change the dependency in debian/control from spawn-fcgi to lighttpd and disable lighttpd once it is installed so you can get spawn-fcgi . I haven’t tested this approach and wouldn’t recommend it.

You can grab the binary package and install it using dpkg or build it yourself from the source tarball. No longer available.

For more information on setting up nginx using php-cgi I recommend the linode howto

• just skip the “Configure spawn-fcgi” step :)