By default, Nginx doesn’t know how to serve PHP files. we need a way to do.
Create a Nginx site
Create a bash script from the below content into the terminal and make sure to give it executable permission with chmod +x filename.sh , when you run this script provide the name of the site for which you want to configure PHP
#!/bin/bash
# Ask for the site name
read -p "Enter the site name (e.g., sitename.com): " site_name
# Create the directory and index.html file
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/$site_name
sudo bash -c "cat > /var/www/$site_name/index.html" <<EOF
<html>
<head>
<title>Welcome to '$site_name'!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 style="color: green;">The '$site_name' is working!</h1>
</body>
</html>
EOF
# Create Nginx virtual host configuration
sudo bash -c "cat > /etc/nginx/sites-available/$site_name" <<EOF
server {
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
root /var/www/$site_name;
index index.html index.htm;
server_name $site_name www.$site_name;
location / {
try_files \$uri \$uri/ =404;
}
}
EOF
# Create symbolic link to enable the site
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/$site_name /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
# Reload Nginx to apply changes
sudo systemctl reload nginx
echo "Site $site_name has been created and configured."
Add Php info file to the site
echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" | sudo tee /var/www/sitename.com/info.php
now access the sitename.com/info.php , you will notice instead of displaying content it is downloading the file because by default, Nginx doesn’t know how to serve PHP files. we need a way to do.
To handle the PHP scripts, we need PHP module, such as PHP-FPM. PHP-FPM operates independently of the NGINX environment by establishing its separate processes.
when a user makes a request for a PHP page, the NGINX server delegates the request to the PHP-FPM service through FastCGI. The installation process of PHP-FPM on Ubuntu depends upon the version of PHP in your Ubuntu server. we will be installing PHP 7.4 version and php7.4-fpm, adjust the below command according to your
# Install essential packages for adding repositories and managing certificates
sudo apt install software-properties-common ca-certificates lsb-release apt-transport-https
# Set the LC_ALL environment variable to ensure proper locale settings
LC_ALL=C.UTF-8
# Add the PHP repository maintained by Ondřej Surý
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
# Update the package list to include the new repository
# and install PHP version 7.4 along with the PHP-FPM package
sudo apt update
sudo apt install php7.4 php7.4-fpm
Edit Site configuration
We created the configuration file with bash script which basically creates a site configuration file at /etc/nginx/sites-available/sitename.com
we need to add this block to the configuration file and please make sure the PHP version.
# pass any file with php to php-fpm
location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
}
Your nginx configuration of sitename.com will look like this
access the php.info file at the browser sitename.com/info.php
Next we will see how we can control the cache of static content with nginx ,