@dvolob
Ok, here’s what we’re going to do. First, deploy a Droplet using Ubuntu 16.10 64bit, preferably a 1GB or 2GB instance. Since we’re running NGINX, PHP-FPM, and MariaDB plus the fact that you’re hosting multiple WordPress installations, we need more resources than would be available on an instance w/ only 512MB.
Once the Droplet is setup, login as root.
Installing NGINX, PHP 7.1.x + PHP-FPM, and MariaDB
Copy + Paste the command from here to the CLI.
You’ll see a dialog box pop up and ask “A new version of /boot/grub/menu.lst is available, but the version installed currently has been locally modified.” – simply hit enter (which selects “keep the local version currently installed”).
What the above command will do seems complex, due to size, but what it specifically does is:
1). Sync current packages against Ubuntu’s repositories.
2). Upgrade all existing packages to their latest versions.
3). Install the build environment needed for NGINX.
4). Install a new PPA so we can use PHP 7.1.x instead of 7.x.
5). Install the most used PHP packages, including PHP-FPM.
6). Download OpenSSL, PCRE, and ZLIB to compile NGINX.
7). Compile NGINX from source.
8). Remove files that we don’t need.
9). Install MariaDB
Once NGINX has finished compiling, it’ll begin installing MariaDB.
Securing MariaDB
Once MariaDB is finished up, we’ll run one more command to wrap up our software installation and to remove un-needed data from MySQL. Simply copy & paste the following command and hit enter.
mysql_secure_installation
In order, do the following:
1). Enter Current Root Password – Hit Enter (one hasn’t been set yet)
2). Set Root Password? – Type y, hit enter, and set a secure password.
3). Remove Anonymous Users? – Type y and hit enter.
4). Disallow root Login Remotely? – Type y and hit enter.
5). Remove test database and access to it? – Type y and hit enter.
6). Reload privilege tables now? – Type y and hit enter.
We’ve now successfully install NGINX from source, PHP 7.1.x + PHP-FPM, and MariaDB.
Configuring NGINX
Now, to get NGINX working the way we want, we need to modify a few files and create a few more directories. To get the directories created, we’ll run:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/sites \
&& sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/config/php
The above are simply storage directories for our websites and PHP configuration.
Now we’ll delete the current NGINX configuration file and create a new one with this configuration. Simply copy everything there and paste it in to the new nginx.conf file that we create with the below command.
sudo rm -rf /etc/nginx/config/nginx.conf \
&& sudo nano /etc/nginx/config/nginx.conf
Now let’s create our first website server block. We’ll store our website server blocks in the sites directory we created above, so:
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites/example.com.conf
With that file open, we’ll paste in:
server {
listen 80;
server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;
root /home/yourdomain/htdocs/public;
index index.php index.html index.htm;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
include /etc/nginx/config/php/php-fpm.conf;
}
Now we need to create our php-fpm.conf file which is required by the above server block. So like the above, we’ll create that file in our newly created php directory.
sudo nano /etc/nginx/config/php/php-fpm.conf
and paste in the contents from this gist.
NGINX is now configured and can be started by running:
nginx
When changes are made, you can reload those changes using:
nginx -s reload
Configuring PHP-FPM
The last thing we need to do is change the way PHP-FPM listens for connections. By default, it uses sockets. This is fine, TCP is most ideal for a multi-site environment.
So we need to open the existing file:
sudo nano /etc/php/7.1/fpm/pool.d/www.conf
and change:
listen = /run/php/php7.1-fpm.sock
to
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000
Then restart PHP-FPM:
sudo service php7.1-fpm restart
What Do I Do Now?
The server block we just created needs to be modified to match a real domain and you need to set a real root path so NGINX knows where to direct requests. Once this is done, you can create an index.php file in the root directory and test the configuration out.
From there, you can create a MySQL Database + User using the MySQL CLI or Adminer/phpMyAdmin (web-based interface) and test a WordPress installation.
How Do I Add New Sites?
You can drop new server blocks in /etc/nginx/sites/ and once set, reload NGINX to make the changes stick, i.e.
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites/newsite.net.conf
Paste in your configuration…
nginx -s reload
Of course, create the directories for each site and make sure the root path is set for each domain.
You can in fact get a little more complex, but before we go in to creating PHP-FPM configurations for each account, I want to make sure we get this setup first!
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