Luke Armstrong

Use Nginx and Apache at the same time

2016-12-29T23:32:00+00:00

Whilst the majority of the projects I work on are using PHP and running on Apache in production, I often play with other languages and frameworks that tend to prefer using Nginx. So I’ve decided to install Nginx alongside Apache so that I can use both.

This is a follow-up from my previous tutorial, Setup Apache, MySQL and PHP using Homebrew on macOS Sierra, this tutorial isn’t intended to be used on production servers, but to make life easier when working with your local development environment.

Nginx will be the primary web server listening on port 80, Apache will be listening on port 8080, so I will proxy all unhandled requests to port 8080 for any projects that I need to run under Apache.

Setup Apache to listen on port 8080

Edit /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/http.conf and find the line:

Listen 80

Change it to:

Listen 8080

Now restart apache.

$ sudo apachectl restart

In your browser if you go to http://localhost/ it should show an error, but if you go to http://localhost:8080/ you should see that Apache is running and showing whatever your default virtual host is.

Install Nginx

$ brew install nginx --with-http2

The default settings for the brew installation of nginx are to listen on port 8080, we need to change this to 80. Edit /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf and find this line:

Listen 8080

Change it to:

Listen 80

Also, we need to change another part of the config to test things are working, so find these lines:

location / {
    root   html;
    index  index.html index.htm;
}

And change them to:

location / {
    root   /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/nginx;
    index  index.html index.htm;
}

Now lets create a test page.

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/nginx
$ echo "Hello World from Nginx" > /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/nginx/index.html

Now lets see if it works, start the nginx server.

$ sudo brew services start nginx

Going to http://localhost/ in your browser should now show the message “Hello World from Nginx”.

Configure Nginx to run PHP

If you followed my previous tutorial, you should have PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0 installed. Just to give you an example of how to get these working with Nginx, I will show you how to setup a couple of virtual hosts.

First though, we need to setup Nginx to read config files for our virtual hosts. Edit /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf and replace the entire config with this:

user nobody nobody;
worker_processes 1;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
}

http {
    include           mime.types;
    default_type      application/octet-stream;
    sendfile          on;
    keepalive_timeout 65;

    # Virtual Hosts Config
    include servers/*;
}

Make a new config file for your virtual host /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers/_localhost.conf

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers
$ vi /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers/_localhost.conf

Enter the following config, it will setup your original localhost site, and create virtual hosts php70.nginx.localhost for PHP 7.0 and php56.nginx.localhost for PHP 5.6.

#
# Localhost
#
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost nginx.localhost;

    root /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/nginx;
    index index.html index.htm;
}


#
# PHP 7.0
#
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name php70.nginx.localhost;

    root /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php {
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9070;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}


#
# PHP 5.6
#
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name php56.nginx.localhost;

    root /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php {
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9056;

        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

Now that you’ve changed your Nginx config, you’ll need to restart the server.

$ sudo brew services restart nginx

Now add these lines to your /etc/hosts file.

0.0.1  nginx.localhost
0.0.1  php56.nginx.localhost
0.0.1  php70.nginx.localhost

Now open these URLs in your web browser, if you visit http://nginx.localhost you should see your test page, then http://php56.nginx.localhost the output of phpinfo() from PHP 5.6, then http://php70.nginx.localhost the output of phpinfo() from PHP 7.0.

Now you can create any other virtual host files in /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers when you need to setup any sites in the future, you don’t need to edit the file we just created.

Proxy unhandled requests to Apache

Now we need to get Apache working again using “real” domain names without needing to add the :8080 port to the end. We need to setup a new virtual host in Nginx which will catch any request not satisfied by our other Nginx virtual hosts, and will be proxied to Apache to be handled normally.

Make a new config file for your virtual host /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers/_default.conf

#
# Any unhandled requests should go to Apache
#
server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    server_name _;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_pass_request_headers on;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
    }
}

This virtual host is set as the default and simply passes the request to port 8080 to be handled by Apache. Now that you’ve changed your Nginx config, you’ll need to restart the server.

$ sudo brew services restart nginx

So now if you go to any Apache virtual host you setup previously, it should still be working. Here are the two URLs we setup for Apache in the previous tutorial;

Apache: PHP 7.0 – http://php70.apache.localhost
Apache: PHP 5.6 – http://php56.apache.localhost

Summary

Now you should have Nginx and Apache both setup with PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0, all running at the same time without needing to stop one to start another.

If you got stuck at any point, and want to reference my configuration files, you can browse them here: https://github.com/lukearmstrong/localhost

Setup Wildcard Virtual Hosts for Apache

2016-12-28T21:00:00+00:00

Fed up with setting up a virtual host each time you work on a new project? Here I explain how to setup wildcard virtual hosts with Apache.

Ordinarily you would have to create a virtual host config file for each project you work on. But if you work on lots of different projects, and you find yourself just copying the same virtual host configuration, we can make life slightly easier by getting Apache to automatically pick up new sites.

Enable Apache Module: mod_vhost_alias

Edit Apache’s main configuration file /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/httpd.conf. Find the following line:

#LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/mod_vhost_alias.so

Uncomment it by removing the # so it looks like this:

LoadModule vhost_alias_module libexec/mod_vhost_alias.so

Save the file.

Create a Wildcard Virtual Host

Next we need to create a Virtual Host that will catch any unhandled requests, we don’t want to break the ability to create our own virtual hosts manually as that can be useful for certain projects.

Create this file: /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/vhosts/_default.conf

UseCanonicalName Off

<Directory "/usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard">
    Allow From All
    AllowOverride All
    Options Indexes FollowSymlinks MultiViews
    Require all granted
</Directory>

<VirtualHost _default_:*>
    VirtualDocumentRoot /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/%0

    <FilesMatch "\.php$">
        SetHandler proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9070
    </FilesMatch>
</VirtualHost>

All wildcard sites will be using PHP 7.0, if you would prefer to use PHP 5.6, change the port number on this line SetHandler proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9070 to 9056.

Because we have changed Apache’s settings, we need to restart it.

$ sudo apachectl restart

So how does this work?

It will take the domain name of the request, wildcardtest1.site and start serving files stored in /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/wildcardtest1.site/. So you could just start adding your project folders to /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/ for each site you start working on.

But, this won’t work for me…

The projects I work on often have different folder structures, for example; Some may have their public web root in a sub-folder called site/, public_html/, public/, htdocs/, httpdocs/.

Because of this, I couldn’t just use the same configuration for all sites.

Also, if you have any subdomains, even www.wildcardtest1.site, then it will be serving files from /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/www.wildcardtest1.site/ instead of /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/wildcardtest1.site/.

We can use symlinks instead

A symbolic link is essentially a shortcut to another location. So what I have decided to do is use symlinks to point to my project’s public web root folder. So my wildcard projects still live in /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/ with all my existing projects, but I point to them from the /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/ folder.

We can also use symlinks to add multiple domains/sub-domains for the same project folder. As you’ll see, even www. prefixed to the domain gets routed to a different location.

In my /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/ folder:

wildcardtest1.site     -> /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/wildcardtest1.site/public/
wildcardtest2.site     -> /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/wildcardtest2.site/htdocs/
wildcardtest3.site     -> /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/wildcardtest3.site/
www.wildcardtest1.site -> /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/wildcardtest1.site/public/
www.wildcardtest2.site -> /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/wildcardtest2.site/htdocs/
www.wildcardtest3.site -> /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/wildcardtest3.site/

Create a new symlink

Assuming you have copied your project folder to /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/my-project/ and your public web root is in a sub-folder called public/

To create a symlink, open a terminal.

$ cd /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_wildcard/
$ ln -s ../my-project/public/ my-project.site
$ ln -s ../my-project/public/ www.my-project.site

Here we have created two symlinks for my-project.site and www.my-project.site, and they will point to /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/my-project/public/.

Don’t forget to update your /etc/hosts file

$ sudo vi /etc/hosts

Add this line to the bottom of the file.

127.0.0.1  my-project.site  www.my-project.site

So now when you go to http://my-project.site/ in your browser you should see your site.

Summary

So now setting up new sites should just involve creating a symlink, and adding a line to your /etc/hosts file. You won’t need to create any more virtual host config files, so you won’t need to restart Apache either!

If you got stuck at any point, and want to reference my configuration files, you can browse them here: https://github.com/lukearmstrong/localhost

Setup Apache, MySQL and PHP using Homebrew on macOS Sierra

2016-12-28T20:40:00+00:00

Step by step instructions to setup a local development environment running multiple versions of PHP simultaneously.

Sure, you could use MAMP like many other developers out there, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but setting things up this way will give you a better understanding of how all of these things come together and nearly everything you learn here will help you in the future if you need to setup Linux servers; Which in all likelihood you will do as understanding DevOps is a useful skill to have.

I took the steps below using a clean install of macOS Sierra, so hopefully I have covered everything that you need to do. macOS Sierra / Xcode is bundled with Apache and PHP, but we won’t be using these as it is an old version of PHP and messing around trying to update it could potentially break something. A disclaimer is necessary here, if you already have a functional development environment, and you decide to follow these steps, you can’t hold me responsible if it all goes wrong and you break your current setup.

Install Xcode and Xcode Command Line Tools

Open up the App Store and search for Xcode to install it.

Once it has installed, you’ll need to open Xcode at least once as there is a Terms & Conditions prompt to accept before you can use the command line tools. Once you have got past the prompt, if any appears you may have already cleared it previously, open the Terminal and enter the command below to install Xcode Command Line Tools.

$ xcode-select --install

The $ is just to indicate this is a command prompt, do not enter it with the command.

Ensure the system installation of Apache is not running.

Enter this command to stop Apache if it is running, the second line below (not prefixed with $) is the error I received from the command, this is to be expected as it shouldn’t be running.

$ sudo apachectl stop
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist: Could not find specified service

This command will stop Apache from starting on boot.

$ sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.httpd.plist 2>/dev/null

Install Homebrew

To install Homebrew, check for the latest installation instructions at http://brew.sh/, but when I installed it I ran the command below.

$ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Homebrew has a utility that will check if everything is setup correctly, run this after installation.

$ brew doctor
Your system is ready to brew.

Add Homebrew taps

taps are extra repositories containing formulae to install software, we will need to add these by entering the commands below.

$ brew tap homebrew/apache
$ brew tap homebrew/completions
$ brew tap homebrew/php

Enable auto-completion for brew commands (optional)

You can skip this step if you want, but to help you use brew, you can enable auto-completion for commands; So when you type brew and mash the tab button you’ll see what commands you can run.

$ brew install bash-completion

After installation you should see a message telling you how to enable auto-completion, mine told me to add this to ~/.bash_profile

[ -f /usr/local/etc/bash_completion ] && . /usr/local/etc/bash_completion

Once you have done this, open a new terminal (or tab), and now you should have auto-completion hints when typing brew and then hitting tab several times.

Install Apache

Now we are ready to install Apache 2.4

$ brew install httpd24 --with-privileged-ports --with-http2

The next step involves using apachectl again, you may remember we used this right at the start to disable the system version of Apache. But now that we have installed Apache using Homebrew, apachectl will be controlling our version of Apache, not the system version. So let’s check this has worked by typing:

$ which apachectl
/usr/local/bin/apachectl

Homebrew installs everything within /usr/local/ so there is no danger of it conflicting with any system-level software. If you get anything else returned as the file path for apachectl, then something hasn’t been setup properly, likely your PATH isn’t setup correctly, run brew doctor again to check.

Assuming everything is fine, we are now ready to start Apache. You’ll need to use sudo with this command because it opens port 80. Don’t use sudo when you don’t need to, it could mess up file ownership and/or permissions.

$ sudo apachectl start

Now open your web browser and go to http://127.0.0.1, you should see a message saying “It works!”

You should now set Apache to launch on startup.

$ sudo brew services start homebrew/apache/httpd24

Install PHP

I’ll be installing PHP 5.6 and 7.0, as previous projects I have worked on are deployed to servers running PHP 5.x, so it is sensible to try to match your development environment to your production environment.

Install PHP 5.6

$ brew install php56 --with-fpm
$ brew install php56-mcrypt
$ brew install php56-xdebug

Because we will be installing multiple versions of PHP, we need to change the default PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) port from 9000 to something else, so I suggest setting it to 9056.

Edit /usr/local/etc/php/5.6/php-fpm.conf and replace this line:

listen = 127.0.0.1:9000

With this line:

listen = 127.0.0.1:9056

Now we are ready to start PHP-FPM (this will also set it to launch on startup).

$ brew services start homebrew/php/php56

Setup Apache to work with PHP-FPM

Edit /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/httpd.conf

We need to enable some Apache modules, they have been commented out, so find these lines and remove the # to uncomment them.

#LoadModule proxy_module libexec/mod_proxy.so
#LoadModule proxy_fcgi_module libexec/mod_proxy_fcgi.so
#LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/mod_rewrite.so

So it should now look like…

LoadModule proxy_module libexec/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_fcgi_module libexec/mod_proxy_fcgi.so
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/mod_rewrite.so

We need to configure Apache to attempt to load index.php by default, so find these lines.

#
# DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory
# is requested.
#
<IfModule dir_module>
    DirectoryIndex index.html
</IfModule>

And change it to this.

#
# DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory
# is requested.
#
<IfModule dir_module>
    DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm
</IfModule>

We also need to enable virtual hosts, so find this line and uncomment it.

#Include /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Now save the file.

We now need to edit the virtual hosts configuration file /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

By default, all of your virtual hosts would go into this file, but it would soon become a mess once you have setup just a few sites. It’s better to use individual files, so either delete or comment out all the lines in this file, and add this to the end.

Include /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/vhosts/*.conf

This will read all the files with the .conf extension in that folder, so to add/edit/remove a virtual host, we just add/edit/delete the individual file. Now we are ready to setup our first virtual host. Create a directory for the config files to live in.

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/vhosts

Now create a file for our virtual host /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/vhosts/_localhost.conf and enter the configuration below.

<Directory "/usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php">
    Allow From All
    AllowOverride All
    Options +Indexes
    Require all granted
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:*>
    ServerName php56.apache.localhost
    DocumentRoot "/usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php"
    ProxyPassMatch ^/(.*\.php(/.*)?)$ fcgi://127.0.0.1:9056/usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php/$1
</VirtualHost>

Now we need to create the folder for the site files.

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php

Now create an index.php file with the following code in that folder.

<?php

phpinfo();

Because we have changed Apache’s settings, we need to restart it.

$ sudo apachectl restart

To get our new virtual host to work in the browser, we need to edit our /etc/hosts file. You’ll need to use sudo to edit this file, so assuming you are comfortable using Vim…

$ sudo vi /etc/hosts

Add this line to the bottom of the file.

127.0.0.1  php56.apache.localhost

Now open your web browser, and go to http://php56.apache.localhost, you should see the output from phpinfo() showing PHP 5.6.29 is installed.

You’ll also see an error saying “It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are required to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function.”

To resolve this edit /usr/local/etc/php/5.6/php.ini, and find this line.

;date.timezone =

Remove the ; to uncomment the setting and set the timezone to UTC.

date.timezone = UTC

Now we have changed PHP’s settings, we need to restart PHP-FPM.

$ brew services restart homebrew/php/php56

If you refresh the browser you’ll now see that the error has gone.

Now we have one version of PHP working with Apache, let’s install PHP 7.0.

Install PHP 7.0

First we need to run this, otherwise the installation will fail as there will conflicts.

$ brew unlink php56

Now we can install PHP 7.0 with the same extensions as above.

$ brew install php70 --with-fpm
$ brew install php70-mcrypt
$ brew install php70-xdebug

Again, because we are installing multiple versions of PHP we need to change the default FPM port from 9000 to something else, so I suggest setting it to 9070. The layout of the config files is slightly different in this version of PHP.

Edit /usr/local/etc/php/7.0/php-fpm.d/www.conf and replace this line:

listen = 127.0.0.1:9000

With this line:

listen = 127.0.0.1:9070

To avoid the same error we had before, edit /usr/local/etc/php/7.0/php.ini and find:

;date.timezone =

Replace the line with:

date.timezone = UTC

Now we are ready to start PHP-FPM (this will also set it to launch on startup).

$ brew services start homebrew/php/php70

Edit our existing Apache virtual host config file to test PHP 7.0 is working, edit /usr/local/etc/apache2/2.4/vhosts/_localhost.conf and add this block to the end of the file.

<VirtualHost *:*>
    ServerName php70.apache.localhost
    DocumentRoot "/usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php"
    ProxyPassMatch ^/(.*\.php(/.*)?)$ fcgi://127.0.0.1:9070/usr/local/var/www/vhosts/_localhost/php/$1
</VirtualHost>

Because we have changed Apache’s settings, we need to restart it.

$ sudo apachectl restart

Again, we need to create an entry in our /etc/hosts file.

$ sudo vi /etc/hosts

Add this line to the end of the file.

127.0.0.1  php70.apache.localhost

Now open your web browser, and go to http://php70.apache.localhost, you should see the output from phpinfo() showing PHP 7.0.14 is installed.

Install MySQL

$ brew install mysql

Now lets start MySQL and get it to run on startup.

$ brew services start mysql

I would recommend you setup a password for root, and only allow access from localhost. There is an easy way to do this.

$ mysql_secure_installation

It’s an interactive prompt, here were my responses.

Would you like to setup VALIDATE PASSWORD plugin? n
New password: root
Re-enter new password: root
Remove anonymous users? y
Disallow root login remotely? y
Remove test database and access to it? y
Reload privilege tables now? y

I’ve noticed that since working on older projects, that MySQL is returning errors to PHP when doing SELECT DISTINCT or GROUP BY queries. Turned out it the default sql_mode in MySQL 5.7 is more restrictive than previous versions. Now, by default it is:

ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

Now this is fine to leave as the default, I would recommend you leave the settings alone unless you have problems.

Initially I tried fixing some of the custom queries, but then started noticing problems from queries generated by WordPress’ get_posts() function, and as I work on so many different WordPress sites I figured that I would end up wasting loads of time trying to fix these on other sites.

You can override this setting by creating a config file for mysql, create a file /usr/local/etc/my.cnf with these settings:

[mysqld]
#sql_mode=ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION # Default for MySQL 5.7
sql_mode=STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

[client]
user=root
password=root

Now if you restart the MySQL server, you shouldn’t be getting these errors.

$ brew services restart mysql

Summary

Now you should have everything you need to get started, each time you need to work on a new project, reference the previous steps to setup a new virtual host for it and restart Apache. In the future, if you need to install a different version of PHP, you can reference the steps here, and it should work.

If you got stuck at any point, and want to reference my configuration files, you can browse them here: https://github.com/lukearmstrong/localhost

Luke Armstrong

Use Nginx and Apache at the same time

Setup Apache to listen on port 8080

Install Nginx

Configure Nginx to run PHP

Proxy unhandled requests to Apache

Summary

Setup Wildcard Virtual Hosts for Apache

Enable Apache Module: mod_vhost_alias

Create a Wildcard Virtual Host

So how does this work?

But, this won’t work for me…

We can use symlinks instead

Create a new symlink

Don’t forget to update your /etc/hosts file

Summary

Further Reading

Setup Apache, MySQL and PHP using Homebrew on macOS Sierra

Install Xcode and Xcode Command Line Tools

Ensure the system installation of Apache is not running.

Install Homebrew

Add Homebrew taps

Enable auto-completion for brew commands (optional)

Install Apache

Install PHP

Install PHP 5.6

Setup Apache to work with PHP-FPM

Install PHP 7.0

Install MySQL

Summary

Further Reading