This section contains notes and hints specific to Lighttpd 1.4 installs of PHP on Unix systems.
Please use the » Lighttpd trac to learn how to install Lighttpd properly before continuing.
Fastcgi is the preferred SAPI to connect PHP and Lighttpd. Fastcgi is automagically enabled in php-cgi in PHP 5.3, but for older versions configure PHP with --enable-fastcgi. To confirm that PHP has fastcgi enabled, php -v should contain PHP 5.2.5 (cgi-fcgi) Before PHP 5.2.3, fastcgi was enabled on the php binary (there was no php-cgi).
To configure Lighttpd to connect to php and spawn fastcgi processes, edit lighttpd.conf. Sockets are preferred to connect to fastcgi processes on the local system.
Example #1 Partial lighttpd.conf
server.modules += ( "mod_fastcgi" )
fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
((
"socket" => "/tmp/php.socket",
"bin-path" => "/usr/local/bin/php-cgi",
"bin-environment" => (
"PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "16",
"PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "10000"
),
"min-procs" => 1,
"max-procs" => 1,
"idle-timeout" => 20
))
)
The bin-path directive allows lighttpd to spawn fastcgi processes dynamically. PHP will spawn children according to the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN environment variable. The "bin-environment" directive sets the environment for the spawned processes. PHP will kill a child process after the number of requests specified by PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS is reached. The directives "min-procs" and "max-procs" should generally be avoided with PHP. PHP manages its own children and opcode caches like APC will only share among children managed by PHP. If "min-procs" is set to something greater than 1, the total number of php responders will be multiplied PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN (2 min-procs * 16 children gives 32 responders).
Lighttpd provides a program called spawn-fcgi to ease the process of spawning fastcgi processes easier.
It is possible to spawn processes without spawn-fcgi, though a bit of heavy-lifting is required. Setting the PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN environment var controls how many children PHP will spawn to handle incoming requests. Setting PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS will determine how long (in requests) each child will live. Here's a simple bash script to help spawn php responders.
Example #2 Spawning FastCGI Responders
#!/bin/sh
# Location of the php-cgi binary
PHP=/usr/local/bin/php-cgi
# PID File location
PHP_PID=/tmp/php.pid
# Binding to an address
#FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS=10.0.1.1:10000
# Binding to a domain socket
FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS=/tmp/php.sock
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=16
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=10000
env -i PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=$PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN \
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=$PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS \
$PHP -b $FCGI_BIND_ADDRESS &
echo $! > "$PHP_PID"
Fastcgi instances can be spawned on multiple remote machines in order to scale applications.
Example #3 Connecting to remote php-fastcgi instances
fastcgi.server = ( ".php" =>
(( "host" => "10.0.0.2", "port" => 1030 ),
( "host" => "10.0.0.3", "port" => 1030 ))
)