This tutorial covers the basics of setting up Wordpress with nginx. If you have already moved your database to another droplet there are a few things you should do differently.

1.) Skip step 1 as you already have your database set up.

2.) Instead of grabbing a new copy of wordpress you can just create a tarball of your current Wordpress install.

3.) If you set this up on a different server than your current Apache wordpress install and are using a remote MySQL server you will need to make sure you update your MySQL permissions to allow logins from the new droplet's private IP.

To do this with your existing Wordpress droplet you would want to do the following:

1.) Install the additional required packages

apt-get update;
apt-get install nginx php5-fpm php5-gd libssh2-php

The nginx service will attempt to start up but will fail since Apache is currently using port 80. This is not a problem at this point.

2.) Next we need to update the php.ini for php5-fpm:

sudo nano /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

You will want to look for cgi.fix_pathinfo. This will be commented out with a semi-colon (;) and set to "1" by default. Now change it to:

cgi.fix_pathinfo=0

3.) Now we can update the nginx configuration to work with php. Open the host configuration with:

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

and update the file so it appears like the one below:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name server_domain_name_or_IP;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

  <^>  error_page 404 /404.html;
    error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }<^>
}

The changes are highlighted.

1. Next we can copy over the Wordpress files from the Apache web root to the nginx web root. cp -Rf /var/www/html/* /usr/share/nginx/html/. We will also want to make sure these files remain owned by www-data to prevent any permissions issues. chown -Rf www-data.www-data /usr/share/nginx/html/*

5.) Your new nginx server should be all ready to run now, lets test and make sure by stopping the apache service and starting nginx

service apache2 stop;
service nginx start;

Now you can load your site in a web browser to ensure everything is working properly.

6.) Once you are sure that things are working properly you can remove apache

apt-get remove apache2;

and if you moved your MySQL services to another droplet as outlined in my previous reply you can also remove the MySQL service

apt-get remove mysql-server;

@ryanpq changed database to another server but database is not accessible for my wordpress ? i Followed the above tutorial correclty but

Error establishing a database connection
This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at 10.132.154.245. This could mean your host's database server is down.

@ryanpq we successfully moved our wordpress sites into two droplets, one for web and other for db.. both droplets were in apache and uses private networking to connect.. SO if i move web server to nginx and db server in apache is ther any problem to connection?

another doubt is if i want to expand my web droplet by creating snapshot and make new one from snapshot, is there any problem to connect in private networking, or do i need to configure again
?

Hello, thank you for the tutorial. i have followed the top instructions exactly. I am able to ping the database server via the file server from the command line using the private IP without any issue. I get an instant response. But for some reason i am not able to connect to the sql server via wordpress. i get an error establishing a database connection.