Nginx + FastCGI with the Quickness

CentOS 6.x (I've got 6.3 here) install. first off, you'll need both nginx and spawn-fcgi as well as php. For purposes of simplicity, I'll just go with the 5.3.3 that yum pulls in, but really any version (I ran it with php 5.4.8 for this example) will work. As long as it's compiled with the -cgi flags. and you have 'php-cgi' available as that's what spawn-fcgi executes.

yum install nginx spawn-fcgi php -y

This will install both of them with their default config's. You'll need to tweak a few things. First off, let's tackle /etc/sysconfig/spawn-fcgi

Spawn-fcgi Config

SOCKET=/var/run/php-fcgi.sock
OPTIONS="-u nginx -g nginx -s $SOCKET -S -M 0600 -C 8 -F 1 -P /var/run/spawn-fcgi.pid -- /usr/bin/php-cgi"

By default this ships with -C 32, which means it'll start 32 php-cgi processes. This seems like a lot in my experience. We have some very busy image servers and they do well with 4 to 8. I usually go with the "# cores + 2" idea and it's worked well for me so far. Any way, you'll also want to make sure you remember where that 'Socket' is defined. It doesn't really matter where it is, but it matters that you remember it!

Nginx Config

server {
  listen  80;
  server_name zabbix.example.com;
  root   /var/www/zabbix;
 
  location / {
   index  index.html index.htm index.php;
  }
 
  location ~ \.php$ {
   include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf;
   fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fcgi.sock;
   fastcgi_index index.php;
  }
 }

This server block will go in either your main nginx.conf file (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf on CentOS), or in a file included from that one. This will define a vhost listening on that "server_name", hosted in that "root". It will use the info in /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf and pass that info over to your socket defined above (I told you to remember that!). Basically, the second location block tells nginx that any file ending with .php should use the fast-cgi and php socket to run. ... and that's it! I highly recommend trolling through the php.ini options as well as any other options in nginx to make sure there aren't any red-flags flying (I know I've tweaked a lot outside of this) but this should get you serving php!