Question

LEMP + HHVM Configuration

Posted February 23, 2015 5.2k views

I’ve been reading about HHVM tonight, and I’d like to try it out myself. From what I’m gathering, it’s as simple as installing HHVM, and then configuring a server block to use it instead of php-fpm (then running “/usr/share/hhvm/install_fastcgi.sh”, right?). So before giving myself a headache, I thought I’d ask a preemptive question.

This is my current server block:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;
    root /var/www/anightinburlington.com/public_html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;
    server_name anightinburlington.com www.anightinburlington.com;
    location / {
            # try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
            try_files $uri $uri/ /wordpress$uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri =404;
            fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
            fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
            fastcgi_index index.php;
            include fastcgi_params;
    }
    error_page 404 /404.html;
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }
    # W3 TOTAL CACHE
}

I’ve only ever really configured these files once (relatively new to VPS, and I learned a LOT at once when I set this all up). That being said, I needed to use this line to get my permalinks with Wordpress to work properly:

try_files $uri $uri/ /wordpress$uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;

I believe this was because I contained my Wordpress installation within a Wordpress folder (var/www/site.com/public_html/wordpress/), rather than use the root. So my question is, how do I go about configuring HHVM with that in place? A lot of guides I’m seeing are saying to comment out all of the old server block code, which would undo my permalink alteration. Any ideas?

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2 answers
UKn0Me February 23, 2015

Give this a whirl

server {
    listen 80;
    root /var/www/anightinburlington.com/public_html/wordpress; 
    # No rewrite rules, just set the Wordpress directory as the root
    server_name www.anightinburlington.com anightinburlington.com; 
    index index.php index.html;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args; 
    # Simplified Wordpress clean URL rewriting

    location ~ \.(hh|php)$ {
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME
        $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_buffer_size 128k;
        fastcgi_buffers 256 16k;
        fastcgi_busy_buffers_size 256k;
        fastcgi_temp_file_write_size 256k;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }
}

This way all you should need to do is start up HHVM, give NGINX a reload and you’ll be good to go!

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  • Porter February 23, 2015

    Thanks for that snippet, it worked. I tried it out, and a few core plugins I use had issues with HHVM, so I’ve fallen back to the old setup. I’m sure that in a few months / years we’ll have greater compatibility, and there’s really no rush (I just like tweaking / adding performance where possible).

    That being said, how do I go about uninstalling hhvm? A quick Google search wasn’t turning up much, just a few people having issues removing it. I suppose I could leave it on my server, but I’d prefer to clean up if possible.

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  • UKn0Me February 23, 2015

    To uninstall HHVM you can run

    sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove hhvm libgmp10 (removes configuration files)

    or

    sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove hhvm libgmp10  (keeps configuration files)
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  • Porter February 23, 2015

    Many thanks!

    Reply Report
Porter February 23, 2015

Thanks for the config file, that should work. I tried this out just now, and got the following error:

Checking if Apache is installed
WARNING: Couldn't find Apache2 configuration paths, not configuring
Checking if Nginx is installed
Detected Nginx installation
Checking for custom Nginx configuration
WARNING: Detected clashing configuration. Look at /etc/nginx/hhvm.conf for information how to connect to the hhvm fastcgi instance.

I’m not loading any other config files to my knowledge, nor doing anything fancy, so I’m not sure what’s wrong here. Any idea what could cause this, and what I might do to remedy it?

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