Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
Last edited 09/01/2008

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

2 Installing MySQL 5.0

First we install MySQL 5.0 like this:

yast2 -i mysql mysql-client

Then we create the system startup links for MySQL (so that MySQL starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start the MySQL server:

chkconfig --add mysql
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Now check that networking is enabled. Run

netstat -tap | grep mysql

In the output you should see something like this:

server1:~ # netstat -tap | grep mysql
tcp 0 0 *:mysql *:* LISTEN 8566/mysqld
server1:~ #

If you don't see a line like this, edit /etc/my.cnf, comment out the option skip-networking:

vi /etc/my.cnf

[...] #skip-networking [...]

and restart your MySQL server:

/etc/init.d/mysql restart

Run

mysqladmin -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

to set a password for the user root@localhost.

As you've seen in the netstat output, MySQL is not only listening on localhost, but on all interfaces, which means it can be accessed from the outside. Therefore we need to set a password for the user root@server1.example.com as well. But there's one little problem: most likely the Host column in the mysql.user table doesn't contain server1.example.com, but server1. We will change that now, and afterwards we will set a MySQL password for the user root@server1.example.com.

Let's connect to MySQL:

mysql -u root -p

Type in the password for the MySQL root user. Then, on the MySQL shell, do this:

mysql> USE mysql;

mysql> SELECT * FROM user;

The output could look like this:

+-----------+------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+---------------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------------+------------+------------+--------------+------------+-----------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+--------------------+------------------+----------+------------+-------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------------+ | Host | User | Password | Select_priv | Insert_priv | Update_priv | Delete_priv | Create_priv | Drop_priv | Reload_priv | Shutdown_priv | Process_priv | File_priv | Grant_priv | References_priv | Index_priv | Alter_priv | Show_db_priv | Super_priv | Create_tmp_table_priv | Lock_tables_priv | Execute_priv | Repl_slave_priv | Repl_client_priv | Create_view_priv | Show_view_priv | Create_routine_priv | Alter_routine_priv | Create_user_priv | ssl_type | ssl_cipher | x509_issuer | x509_subject | max_questions | max_updates | max_connections | max_user_connections | +-----------+------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+---------------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------------+------------+------------+--------------+------------+-----------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+--------------------+------------------+----------+------------+-------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------------+ | localhost | root | *5172022923C5A97E5A842DA249B93473314416D5 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | | server1 | root | | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | | 127.0.0.1 | root | | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | | | | | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | +-----------+------+-------------------------------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+---------------+--------------+-----------+------------+-----------------+------------+------------+--------------+------------+-----------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------------+------------------+------------------+----------------+---------------------+--------------------+------------------+----------+------------+-------------+--------------+---------------+-------------+-----------------+----------------------+ 3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

As you see, in the second row, it reads server1 instead of server1.example.com in the Host column. Let's replace that with server1.example.com:

mysql> UPDATE user SET Host = 'server1.example.com' WHERE Host = 'server1';

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

We can leave the MySQL shell now:

mysql> quit;

Now back on the normal shell, we can set the MySQL password for the user root@server1.example.com:

mysqladmin -h server1.example.com -u root password yourrootsqlpassword

3 Installing Lighttpd

Lighttpd is available as an OpenSUSE package, therefore we can install it like this:

yast2 -i lighttpd

Then we create the system startup links for Lighttpd (so that Lighttpd starts automatically whenever the system boots) and start it:

chkconfig --add lighttpd
/etc/init.d/lighttpd start

Now direct your browser to http://192.168.0.100, and you should see that Lighttpd delivers a page (well, it's a 404 page because there's no index file in Lighttpd's document root, but at least this means that Lighttpd is working ok):

Lighttpd's default document root is /srv/www/htdocs on OpenSUSE, and the configuration file is /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf.

4 Installing PHP5

We can make PHP5 work in Lighttpd through FastCGI. There's a FastCGI package for PHP5 available on OpenSUSE, php5-fastcgi, which we install like this:

yast2 -i php5-fastcgi

5 Configuring Lighttpd And PHP5

To enable PHP5 in Lighttpd, we must modify three files, /etc/php5/fastcgi/php.ini, /etc/lighttpd/modules.conf, and /etc/lighttpd/conf.d/fastcgi.conf. First we open /etc/php5/fastcgi/php.ini and uncomment the line cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 somewhere in the middle of the file:

vi /etc/php5/fastcgi/php.ini

[...] ; cgi.fix_pathinfo provides *real* PATH_INFO/PATH_TRANSLATED support for CGI. PHP's ; previous behaviour was to set PATH_TRANSLATED to SCRIPT_FILENAME, and to not grok ; what PATH_INFO is. For more information on PATH_INFO, see the cgi specs. Setting ; this to 1 will cause PHP CGI to fix it's paths to conform to the spec. A setting ; of zero causes PHP to behave as before. Default is 1. You should fix your scripts ; to use SCRIPT_FILENAME rather than PATH_TRANSLATED. cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 [...]

Then we open /etc/lighttpd/modules.conf and uncomment the line include "conf.d/fastcgi.conf":

vi /etc/lighttpd/modules.conf

[...] ## ## FastCGI (mod_fastcgi) ## include "conf.d/fastcgi.conf" [...]

Finally we open /etc/lighttpd/conf.d/fastcgi.conf and make sure that it contains the line server.modules += ( "mod_fastcgi" ); then we comment out the fastcgi.server stanza:

vi /etc/lighttpd/conf.d/fastcgi.conf

[...] server.modules += ( "mod_fastcgi" ) [...] ## PHP Example ## For PHP don't forget to set cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1 in the php.ini. ## ## The number of php processes you will get can be easily calculated: ## ## num-procs = max-procs * ( 1 + PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN ) ## ## for the php-num-procs example it means you will get 17*5 = 85 php ## processes. you always should need this high number for your very ## busy sites. And if you have a lot of RAM. :) ## fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ( "php-local" => ( "socket" => socket_dir + "/php-fastcgi-1.socket", "bin-path" => server_root + "/cgi-bin/php5", "max-procs" => 1, "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable", ) ), ( "php-tcp" => ( "host" => "127.0.0.1", "port" => 9999, "check-local" => "disable", "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable", ) ), ( "php-num-procs" => ( "socket" => socket_dir + "/php-fastcgi-2.socket", "bin-path" => server_root + "/cgi-bin/php5", "bin-environment" => ( "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16", "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000", ), "max-procs" => 5, "broken-scriptfilename" => "enable", ) ), ) [...]

Then we restart Lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

6 Testing PHP5 / Getting Details About Your PHP5 Installation

The document root of the default web site is /srv/www/htdocs. We will now create a small PHP file (info.php) in that directory and call it in a browser. The file will display lots of useful details about our PHP installation, such as the installed PHP version.

vi /srv/www/htdocs/info.php

Now we call that file in a browser (e.g. http://192.168.0.100/info.php):

As you see, PHP5 is working, and it's working through FastCGI, as shown in the Server API line. If you scroll further down, you will see all modules that are already enabled in PHP5. MySQL is not listed there which means we don't have MySQL support in PHP5 yet.

7 Getting MySQL Support In PHP5

To get MySQL support in PHP, we can install the php5-mysql package. It's a good idea to install some other PHP5 modules as well as you might need them for your applications:

yast2 -i php5-mysql php5-bcmath php5-bz2 php5-calendar php5-ctype php5-curl php5-dbase php5-dom php5-ftp php5-gd php5-gettext php5-gmp php5-iconv php5-imap php5-ldap php5-mbstring php5-mcrypt php5-mhash php5-ncurses php5-odbc php5-openssl php5-pcntl php5-pgsql php5-posix php5-shmop php5-snmp php5-soap php5-sockets php5-sqlite php5-sysvsem php5-tokenizer php5-wddx php5-xmlrpc php5-xsl php5-zlib php5-exif php5-pear php5-sysvmsg php5-sysvshm

Now restart Lighttpd:

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart

Now reload http://192.168.0.100/info.php in your browser and scroll down to the modules section again. You should now find lots of new modules there, including the MySQL module:

8 Links

• Lighttpd: http://www.lighttpd.net
• PHP: http://www.php.net
• MySQL: http://www.mysql.com
• OpenSUSE: http://www.opensuse.org