Joomla! Documentation™

Nginx is light-weight web-server which run on more than 6% over internet web-servers[1].

Here are some instructions on how-to install it on Gentoo Linux machine and install joomla within this server.

PHP installation

PHP will run as fastcgi service (fpm), so Nginx server will run php separately (as different process):

# echo "dev-lang/php gd gd2 curl simplexml tokenizer dom tidy sqlite xml fpm cgi" >> /etc/portage/package.use
# emerge php

The default of php-fpm is good for most servers. For special configuration visit php site.

Install nginx

In Linux you'll need to use emerge command. In other distros it would be apt-get, rpm, etc (depend on the distro).

# emerge nginx

Configure Nginx

The configuration of the virtual host on Gentoo lives in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf. Here is example from the author server:

        server {
                listen 80;
                server_name YOUR_DOMAIN;
                server_name_in_redirect off;

                access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main;
                error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log info;

                root PATH_ON_SERVER;
                # this is the sef of Joomla
                location / {
                        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$request_uri;
                }

                index index.php index.html index.htm default.html default.htm;
                # unauthorize running scripts inside writable directories
                location ~* /(images|cache|media|logs|tmp)/.*\.(php|pl|py|jsp|asp|sh|cgi)$ {
                        return 403;
                        error_page 403 /403_error.html;
                }

                location ~ .*.php$ {
                    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf;
                    fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000;
                    fastcgi_index index.php;
                    include fastcgi_params;
                    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                }

                # caching of files 
                location ~* \.(ico|pdf|flv)$ {
                        expires 1y;
                }

                location ~* \.(ico|pdf|flv)$ {
                        expires 1y;
                }

                location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|swf|xml|txt)$ {
                        expires 14d;
                }

        }

Pay attention for few things:

1. The sef of Joomla is inside.
2. The argument fastcgi_pass set to 127.0.0.1:9000 as the fpm configured to listen on this port. That's mean you can run the php on separate servers. You can find this configuration in /etc/php/fpm-php5.3/php-fpm.conf/
3. Don't forget to replace YOUR_DOMAIN & PATH_ON_SERVER depend on your domain and the path of Joomla on your server.

GZip support

If you need GZip compression support add the next code into the http section (inside /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

        gzip on;
        gzip_http_version 1.1;
        gzip_comp_level 6;
        gzip_min_length 1100;
        gzip_buffers 4 8k;
        gzip_types text/plain application/xhtml+xml text/css application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascr$
        gzip_proxied     any;
        gzip_disable     "MSIE [1-6]\.";