[justincormack]

It really is trivial to set up an fcgi process to run PHP directly from nginx.

On the nginx side, something like my config: location ~ \.php { fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_pass localhost:55155; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; }

Then you just need to run php in fcgi daemon mode which is built in, use php-cgi -b localhost:55155 to match that setup... more details on http://wiki.nginx.org/PHPFcgiExample

I found this much simpler than running nginx and apache...

[nbpoole]

If you do that, you have to be very careful. I actually did a writeup about this a few days ago that I posted on HN: https://nealpoole.com/blog/2011/04/setting-up-php-fastcgi-an...

tl:dr is that the configuration you're suggesting will leave a site open to arbitrary code execution if the site allows for user uploads.

[justincormack]

Thats not a full config, I did reference the documentation. I have a try_files line, as fcgi runs locally as it happens.

[Yaa101]

Just use PHP-FPM instead, it's easier and scales better. I run PHP, Django/Python and Perl without a problem at a single domain. NGINX allows to run almost anything as long as you are able to attach the socket of what you want to output towards NGINX.

[chopsueyar]

A socket is probably faster.

[justincormack]

Not really the bottleneck if you are running PHP. Linux optimises most of tcp out over the loopback device anyway.

[treo]

I ran into a problem with a tcp connection to php-fpm just some weeks ago: The Server served requests at a rate of about 400req/s for some time without a single problem, until I ran out of useable ports. You won't have this problem with sockets.