This is an example configuration from running Drupal using nginx. Which is a high-performance non-blocking HTTP server.
Nginx doesn't use a module like Apache does for PHP support. The Apache module approach simplifies a lot of things because what you have in reality is nothing less than a PHP engine running on top of the HTTP server.
Instead nginx uses FastCGI to proxy all requests for PHP processing to a php fastcgi daemon that is waiting for incoming requests and then handles the php file being requested.
Although the fcgi approach is more cumbersome to set up it provides a greater degree of control over which actions are permitted, hence greater security.
This configuration started life as a fork of yhager's configuration, tempered by omega8cc and Brian Mercer (dead link) configurations.
I've since then changed it substantially. Tried to remove as best
as I can the traces of bad habits promoted by Apache's
configuration logic. Namely the use of a .htaccess
and what it
entails in terms or reverse logic on the server
configuration. I've incorporated tidbits and advices gotten,
mostly, from the nginx mailing list and the
nginx Wiki.
Jump immediately to the installation. I'll read up on all other stuff later.
The configuration comes in two flavors:
-
Drupal 6.
-
Drupal 7.
Furthermore there are two options for each configuration:
-
A non drush aware option that uses
wget/curl
to run cron and updating the site usingupdate.php
, i.e., via a web interface. -
A drush aware flavor that runs cron and updates the site using drush.
To get drush to run cron jobs the easiest way is to define your own site aliases. See the example aliases file
example.aliases.drushrc.php
that comes under theexamples
directory in the drush distribution.Example: You create the aliases for example.com and example.org, with aliases
@excom
and@exnet
respectively.Your crontab should contain something like:
COLUMNS=80 DRUSH=/full/path/to/drush */50 * * * * $DRUSH @excom cron -q 1 2 * * * $DRUSH @exnet cron -q
This means that the cron job for example.com will be run every 50 minutes and the cron job for example.net will be run every day at 02:01 hours. Check the section 7 of the Drupal
INSTALL.txt
for further details about running cron.Note that the
/path/to/drush
is the path to the shell script wrapper that comes with drush not to to thedrush.php
script. If usingdrush.php
then addphp
in front of the/path/to/drush.php
.
The configuration has 3 main branches:
-
A D7 branch if you're running Drupal 7 sites only on a given machine use this branch.
-
A D6 branch if you're running Drupal 6 sites only on a given machine use this branch.
-
A master branch if you're running both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 sites on a given machine use this branch.
It happens that some sites have URIs that use
reserved characters. In
that case because we're not using any rewrite and since Nginx
makes the exact matching of locations without escaping the reserved
characters present in a URI we must use another mechanism for
performing the escape. I've opted for the
set_by_lua
directive made available by the
Embedded Lua module. This
module provides a method
ngx.escape_uri
that encodes a URI.
## Drupal 7 site. We define a new variable that has the escaped
## URI as value.
set_by_lua $escaped_uri 'return ngx.escape_uri($uri)';
This means that each configuration has an escaped uri version.
- I'm not using Boost:
-
On drupal 7 use the
drupal.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupals/drupal.conf;
. -
On drupal 7 having to serve URIs that need to be escaped, e.g., that have
+
and/or?
then use thedrupal_escaped.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupal/drupal_escaped.conf
. -
On drupal 6 use the
drupal6.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupals/drupal6.conf;
. -
On drupal 6 if having to serve URIs that need to be escaped, e.g., that have
+
and/or?
then use thedrupal6_escaped.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupal/drupal6_escaped.conf
.
- I'm using Boost for caching on my drupal site.
-
On drupal 7 use the
drupal_boost.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupal/drupal_boost.conf;
. -
On drupal 7 if having to serve URIs that need to be escaped, e.g., that have
+
and/or?
then use thedrupal_boost_escaped.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupal/drupal_boost_escaped.conf
. -
On drupal 6 use the
drupal_boost6.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupal/drupal_boost6.conf;
. -
On drupal 6 if having to serve URIs that need to be escaped, e.g., that have
+
and/or?
then use thedrupal_boost6_escaped.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupal/drupal_boost6_escaped.conf
.
-
I'm not using drush for updating and running cron. Additionally you should also include the
drupal_cron_update.conf
config in your vhost (server
block):include apps/drupal/drupal_cron_update.conf;
-
I'm using drupal 8. Just use the drupal 7 configuration. The only thing that changes so far is the location of
install.php
.It's
/core/install.php
instead ofinstall.php
.
The standard Drupal 6 core sets cookies also for anonymous
users. Therefore the following map directive from map_cache.conf
will result in the Boost generated pages not being served.
map $http_cookie $no_cache {
default 0;
~SESS 1; # PHP session cookie
}
If you're using the standard Drupal 6 without
no_anon
then the cache bursting
map directive is:
map $http_cookie $no_cache {
default 0;
~DRUPAL_UID 1; # PHP session cookie
}
This is properly documented in map_cache.conf
.
There's a setting that is enabled by default in
globalredirect
that
removes the trailing slash in the URIs. That setting creates a
redirect loop with the 0 rewrites config provided by
sites-available/drupal.conf
or sites-available/drupal_boost.conf
if using Boost.
There are two ways to deal with that:
-
Install the module
nginx_fast_config
that takes care of this setting removing it from the settings form at/admin/settings/globalredirect
and presents a status line on the status page at/admin/reports/status
. This module fixes the issues for you. -
Take care of the deslash setting yourself by disabling it at
/admin/settings/globalredirect
. Note that this is enabled by default.
This is strictly a drupal 6 issue.
-
The use of two
server
directives to do the domain name rewriting, usually redirectingwww.example.com
toexample.com
or vice-versa. As recommended in nginx Wiki Pitfalls page. -
Clean URL support.
-
Access control for
cron.php
. It can only be requested from a set of IPs addresses you specify. This is for the non drush aware version. -
Support for multisite.
-
Support for the Boost module.
-
Support for virtual hosts. The
example.com.conf
file. -
Support for Sitemaps RSS feeds.
-
Support for the Filefield Nginx Progress module for the upload progress bar.
-
Use of non-capturing regex for all directives that are not rewrites that need to use URI components.1
-
IPv6 and IPv4 support.
-
Support for private file serving in drupal.
-
Support for hot link protection imagecache generated images.
-
If using
php-cgi
with UNIX sockets in/tmp/
subdirectory with permissions 700, i.e., accessible only to the user running the process. You may consider the init script that I make available here on github that launches the PHP FastCGI daemon and spawns new instances as required. This is not needed if you're using php-fpm. -
End of the expensive 404s that Drupal usually handles when using Apache with the default
.htaccess
. -
Possibility of using Apache as a backend for dealing with PHP. Meaning using Nginx as reverse proxy.
-
Advanced Help support.
-
Advanced Aggregation support.
-
Microcaching support for both anonymous and authenticated users.
-
Support for escaped URIs, i.e., URIs that require percent encoding.
-
ETag support. This requires a Nginx version greater or equal to 1.3.3.
-
Support for drupal 8.
-
By default and since version 0.8.21 only SSLv3 and TLSv1 are supported. The anonymous Diffie-Hellman (ADH) key exchange and MD5 message autentication algorithms are not supported. They can be enabled explicitly but due to their insecure nature they're discouraged. The same goes for SSLv2.
-
SSL/TLS shared cache for SSL session resume support of 10 MB. SSL session timeout is set to 10 minutes.
-
Note that for session resumption to work the setting of the SSL socket as default, at least, is required. Meaning a listen directive like this:
listen [::]:443 ssl default_server;
This is so because session resumption takes place before any TLS extension is enabled, namely Server Name Indication. The ClientHello message requests a session ID from a given IP address (server). Therefore the default server setting is required.
Another option, the one I've chosen here, is to move the
ssl_session_cache
directive to thehttp
context setting. Of course the downside of this approach is that thessl_session_cache
settings are the same for all configured virtual hosts.
-
No direct access to PHP scripts. All PHP scripts, including
index.php
are acessed only internally. -
The use of a
default
configuration file to block all illegalHost
HTTP header requests. -
Access control using HTTP Basic Auth for
install.php
and other Drupal sensitive files. The configuration expects a password file named.htpasswd-users
in the top nginx configuration directory, usually/etc/nginx
. I provide an empty file. This is also for the non drush aware version.If you're on Debian or any of its derivatives like Ubuntu you need either the thttpd-util or apache2-utils package installed.
With
thttpd-util
create your password file by issuing:thtpasswd -c .htpasswd-users
With
apache2-utils
create your password file by issuing:htpasswd -d -b -c .htpasswd-users
You should delete this command from your shell history afterwards with
history -d <command number>
or alternatively omit the-b
switch, then you'll be prompted for the password.This creates the file (there's a
-c
switch). For adding additional users omit the-c
.If you're on Debian or any of its derivatives like Ubuntu you need the apache2-utils package installed. Then create your password file by issuing:
htpasswd -d -b -c .htpasswd-users <user> <password>
You should delete this command from your shell history afterwards with
history -d <command number>
or alternatively omit the-b
switch, then you'll be prompted for the password.This creates the file (there's a
-c
switch). For adding additional users omit the-c
.Of course you can rename the password file to whatever you want, then accordingly change its name in drupal_boost.conf.
-
Support for X-Frame-Options HTTP header to avoid Clickjacking attacks.
-
Protection of the upload directory. You can try to bypass the UNIX
file
utility or the PHPFileinfo
extension and upload a fake jpeg:echo -e "\xff\xd8\xff\xe0\n<?php echo 'hello'; ?>" > test.jpg
If you run
php test.jpg
you get 'hello'. The fact is that all files with php extension are either matched by a particular location, as is the case forxmlrpc.php
,update.php
andinstall.php
or match the last directive of the configuration:location ~* ^.+\.php$ { return 404; }
Returning a 404 (Not Found) for every PHP file not matched by all the previous locations.
Note that
index.php
is accessed only indirectly, meaning it always from within the Nginx config. You cannot access it directly from outside. -
Use of Strict Transport Security for enhanced security. It forces during the specified period for the configured domain to be contacted only over HTTPS. Requires a modern browser to be of use, i.e., Chrome/Chromium, Firefox 4 or Firefox with NoScript.
-
DoS prevention with a low number of connections by client allowed: 32. This number can be adjusted as you see fit.
-
The Drupal specific headers like
X-Drupal-Cache
provided by pressflow or theX-Generator
header that Drupal 7 sets are both hidden. -
Limitation of allowed HTTP methods. Out of the box only
GET
,HEAD
andPOST
are allowed.
This config assumes that private files are stored under a directory
named private
. I suggest sites/default/files/private
or
sites/<sitename>/files/private
but can be anywhere inside the site
root as long as you keep the top level directory name private
. If
you want to have a different name for the top level then replace in
the location ~* private
in drupal.conf
and/or drupal7.conf
the name of your private files top directory.
Example: Calling the top level private files directory protected
instead of private
.
location ^~ /sites/default/files/protected {
internal;
}
Now any attempt to access the files under this directory directly will return a 404.
Note that this practice it's not what's usually recommended. The usual practice involves setting up a directory outside of files directory and giving write permissions to the web server user. While that might be a simple alternative in the sense that doesn't require to tweak the web server configuration, I think it to be less advisable, in the sense that now there's another directory that is writable by the server.
I prefer to use a directory under files
, which is the only one
that is writable by the web server, and use the above location
(protected
or private
) to block access by the client to it.
Also bear in mind that the above configuration stanza is for a drupal 7 or a drupal 6 site not relying on purl. For sites that use it, e.g., sites/products based on spaces like OpenAtrium or ManagingNews require a regex based location, i.e.:
location ~* /sites/default/files/protected {
internal;
}
in order to work properly.
Nginx implements Lighty X-Sendfile using the header: X-Accel-Redirect.
This allows fast private file transfers. I've developed a module tailored for Nginx: nginx_accel_redirect.
The connection zone defined, called arbeit
allows for 32
connections to be established for each client. That seems to me to
be a reasonable number. It could happen that you have a setup
with lots of CDNs (see this
issue)
or extensive
domain sharding
and the number of allowed connections by client can be greater than
32, specially when using Nginx as a reverse proxy.
It may happen that 32 is not enough and you start getting a lot of
503 Service Unavailable
status codes as a reply from the
server. In that case tweak the value of limit_conn
until you have
a working setup. This number must be as small as possible as a way
to mitigate the potential for DoS attacks.
ETags are an additional facility to help caching of static assets on the web. Usually based on the file modification time a hash is generated. The hash is sent as an additional header to the client. Here's an example of a request reply with an ETag:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:46:36 GMT
Content-Type: image/png
Content-Length: 5399
Last-Modified: Wed, 02 May 2012 16:36:16 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=10
ETag: "4fa16280-1517"
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Imagecache generated images can be expensive to generate. In those cases providing protection against hotlinking is a must.
To make use of that uncomment the proper line on the /imagecache/
location that includes the
sites-available/hotlinking_protection.conf
file.
The protection is based on the Nginx referer module. You must specify the hosts that are allowed to access the images. The hostnames can use wildcards or use regexes.
For a standard drupal install there's no need for any method
besides GET
, HEAD
and POST
. The allowed methods are
enumerated in the file map_block_http_methods.conf
.
If your site uses/provide web services then you must add the
methods you need to the list. For example if you want to allow
PUT
then do:
map $request_method $not_allowed_method {
default 1;
GET 0;
HEAD 0;
POST 0;
PUT 0;
}
Note that this enables PUT
for all locations and clients. If you
need a finer control then use the
limit_except
directive and enumerate the client IPs that are allowed to use the
extra methods like PUT
.
Drupal multisite
is supported out of the box with this configuration you just need
to configure the
server_name
directive with all the sites that your Drupal installation
serves.
For example your Drupal installation serves the sites
foo.example.com
, bar.example.net
and
baz.foo.example.org
. Then you need to configure your vhost like
this:
server_name foo.example.com bar.example.net baz.foo.example.org;
Note that Nginx allows for the server name to be either a regex or a wildcard expression. See this to delve deeper into the multiple ways to define server names.
This is the most simple multisite setup. You can have different vhosts. I find that it sorts of defeats the purpose to have to deal with different vhosts for a multisite. You get all the advantages of a set of separate sites in terms of web server configuration, while getting no advantage in terms of code separation.
As very wise man once said: everyhting in life is a matter of taste. I don't like multisite. It's something that might be handy for dealing with small sites, but quickly becomes unmaintanable with large sites. Code separation is a good thing. You've been warned.
If you absolutely need to use the rather bad habit of
deploying web apps relying on .htaccess
, or you just want to use
Nginx as a reverse proxy. The config allows you to do so. Note that
this provides some benefits over using only Apache, since Nginx is
much faster than Apache. Not only due to its architecture but also
to using
buffering
for handling upstream replies. Furthermore you can use the proxy
cache and/or use Nginx as a load balancer.
The /
location is a fallback location, meaning that after
trying all other, more specific locations, Nginx, will return here.
Since there's a try_files $uri
directive within @cache
, if using
Boost, or @drupal
, or
index.php?q=$uri&$args
otherwise, as fallback it will return a
404 if no file is found. Even if you have an index.html
file at
the root. That is for a request URI of /
. It will work however
with /index.html
, since that's the argument of the try_files
directive.
There's several possible ways to fix that. Be with nested locations
inside location /
or with an aditional try_files $uri/index.html
.
The one I opted for is instead making use of the
error_page
directive. There's an exact location /
that issues a
200 code and serves /index.html
when a 404 is returned.
Nginx has a directive
gzip_static
that when set to on
in a given location makes it always search for
a file ending in .gz
before trying to serve the file. This involves
making an additional stat()
call. It isn't generally used. So
you can save that additional call for extracting even more speed from
Nginx.
Example if we're trying to serve foobar.html
in a certain location
if gzip_static
is set to on
, then Nginx will make a stat()
call
to try to serve foobar.html.gz
first.
Exceptions to that rule are rare in the drupal world. The most common occasion to found such a practice is when using Boost. Since there's a configuration option to make it create gzipped HTML pages in its cache.
By default on the Boost cache locations we have:
gzip_static on;
If you have other locations, besides the Boost cache, that have gzipped files to be served you have to set:
gzip_static on;
Note that in order to use gzip_static
the
ngx_http_gzip_static_module
must be enabled. Check your nginx with nginx -V
to see if the
module is enabled.
Microcaching
is a caching concept that takes simple is better approach. Meaning
we don't care about content expiration because the cache valid time
is small enough for that not to be an issue. In this config we set
it to 15 seconds. You can tune all cache parameters to your
liking. Check the microcache_fcgi.conf
or microcache_proxy.conf
for anonymous users cache and microcache_fcgi_auth.conf
or
microcache_proxy_auth.conf
for authenticated users cache.
You can implement a microcaching strategy on drupal using cache_warmer. Tune the many options of that drush command to fit your site traffic pattern.
This configuration supports both anonymous and authenticated users caching. You should enable one and only one. The authenticated user cache also supports anonymous users.
By default on both drupal 6 and drupal 7 the anonymous user microcache is enabled. If you want to use the authenticated user microcache instead comment out the line:
-
include apps/drupal/microcache_fcgi.conf
if using the FCGI microcache (when proxying to FCGI). -
include apps/drupal/microcache_proxy.conf
if using the proxy cache (proxying to Apache or other PHP handler).
and uncomment:
-
include apps/drupal/microcache_fcgi_auth.conf
if using the FCGI microcache (when proxying to FCGI). -
include apps/drupal/microcache_proxy_auth.conf
if using the proxy cache (proxying to Apache or other PHP handler).
You're set to go.
When using Boost you can use the authenticated user microcache. It will give you an additional layer of caching.
This is enabled by default. Comment out the include sites-available/microcache_fcgi_auth.conf
or include sites-available/microcache_proxy_auth.conf
line if you don't want to
use microcaching at all with Boost.
The way microcaching for authentitcated is implemented uses a
$cache_uid
variable that is set on
map_cache.conf
.
-
anonymous users get a
$cache_uid
value ofnil
. -
authenticated users get a
$cache_uid
value that is the session id. Note that the named capture that grabs the session ID assumes that you're using the default setting in terms of what drupal calls the session cookie. Hence it starts withSESS
. If this isn't the case just remove the stringSESS
from the regex.See
drupal_settings_initialize()
for drupal 7 orconf_init()
for drupal 6 for further information.
Here's two useful scripts for working with the Nginx cache:
-
nginx cache inspector allows you to inspect the cache files.
-
nginx cache purge allows you to purge and item or set of items from the Nginx cache.
The configuration of the example vhosts uses separate sockets for
IPv6 and IPv4. This way is simpler for those not (yet) having IPv6
support to disable it by commenting out the
listen
directive with the ipv6only=on
parameter.
Note that the IPv6 address uses an IP stolen from the IPv6 Wikipedia page. You must replace the indicated address by your address.
For Nginx versions greater or equal than 1.3.4 IPv6 and IPv4 sockets are separate by default.
-
Move the old
/etc/nginx
directory to/etc/nginx.old
. -
Clone the git repository from github:
git clone https://github.com/perusio/drupal-with-nginx.git
If you want to use only the Drupal specific version configuration you must do one of the checkouts below:
-
For the D7 branch (running only D7 sites on the same server):
git checkout D7
-
For the D6 branch (running only D6 sites on the same server):
git checkout D6
-
Edit the
sites-available/example.com.conf
configuration file to suit your requirements. Namely replacing example.com with your domain. -
Setup the PHP handling method. It can be:
-
Upstream HTTP server like Apache with mod_php. To use this method comment out the
include upstream_phpcgi.conf;
line innginx.conf
and uncomment the lines:include reverse_proxy.conf; include upstream_phpapache.conf;
Now you must set the proper address and port for your backend(s) in the
upstream_phpapache.conf
. By default it assumes the loopback127.0.0.1
interface on port8080
. Adjust accordingly to reflect your setup.Comment out all
fastcgi_pass
directives in eitherdrupal_boost.conf
ordrupal_boost_drush.conf
, depending which config layout you're using. Uncomment out all theproxy_pass
directives. They have a comment around them, stating these instructions. -
FastCGI process using php-cgi. In this case an init script is required. This is how the server is configured out of the box. It uses UNIX sockets. You can use TCP sockets if you prefer.
-
PHP FPM, this requires you to configure your fpm setup, in Debian/Ubuntu this is done in the
/etc/php5/fpm
directory.Look here for an example configuration of
php-fpm
.Check that the socket is properly created and is listening. This can be done with
netstat
, like this for UNIX sockets:netstat --unix -l
And like this for TCP sockets:
netstat -t -l
or sudo netstat -t -l -p
It should display the PHP CGI socket.
Note that the default socket type is UNIX and the config assumes it to be listening on
unix:/tmp/php-cgi/php-cgi.socket
, if using thephp-cgi
, or inunix:/var/run/php-fpm.sock
usingphp-fpm
and that you should change to reflect your setup by editingupstream_phpcgi.conf
.
-
Create the
/etc/nginx/sites-enabled
directory and enable the virtual host using one of the methods described below.Note that if you're using the nginx_ensite script described below it creates the
/etc/nginx/sites-enabled
directory if it doesn't exist the first time you run it for enabling a site. -
Reload Nginx:
/etc/init.d/nginx reload
-
Check that your site is working using your browser.
-
Remove the
/etc/nginx.old
directory. -
Done.
I've created a shell script nginx_ensite that lives here on github for quick enabling and disabling of virtual hosts.
If you're not using that script then you have to manually
create the symlinks from sites-enabled
to sites-available
. Only
the virtual hosts configured in sites-enabled
will be available
for Nginx to serve.
You can get the
status and a ping pages
for the running instance of php-fpm
. There's a
php_fpm_status.conf
file with the configuration for both
features.
-
the status page at
/fpm-status
; -
the ping page at
/ping
.
For obvious reasons these pages are acessed only from a given set of IP addresses. In the suggested configuration only from localhost and non-routable IPs of the 192.168.1.0 network.
The allowed hosts are defined in a geo block in file
php_fpm_status_allowed_hosts.conf
. You should edit the predefined
IP addresses to suit your setup.
To enable the status and ping pages uncomment the line in the
example.com.conf
virtual host configuration file.
I maintain a debian repository with the latest version of Nginx. This is packaged for Debian unstable or testing. The instructions for using the repository are presented on this page.
It may work or not on Ubuntu. Since Ubuntu seems to appreciate more finding semi-witty names for their releases instead of making clear what's the status of the software included, meaning. Is it stable? Is it testing? Is it unstable? The package may work with your currently installed environment or not. I don't have the faintest idea which release to advise. So you're on your own. Generally the APT machinery will sort out for you any dependencies issues that might exist.
The config is quite tight in the sense that if you have something
that is not contemplated in the exact match locations,
/index.php
, /install.php
, etc, and you try to make it work it
will fail. Some Drupal modules like
ad provide a PHP
script. This script needs to be invoked. In the case of the ad
module you must add the following location block:
location = /sites/all/modules/ad/serve.php {
fastcgi_pass phpcgi;
}
Of course this assumes that you installed the ad module such that
is usable for all sites. To make it usable when targeting a single
site, e.g., mysite.com
, insert instead:
location = /sites/mysite.com/modules/ad/serve.php {
fastcgi_pass phpcgi;
}
Proceed similarly for other modules requiring the usage of PHP
scripts like `ad`.
There's a nginx groups.drupal.org group for sharing and learning more about using nginx with Drupal.
I use Monit for supervising the nginx daemon. Here's my configuration for nginx.
You should always test the configuration with nginx -t
to see
if everything is correct. Only after a successful should you reload
nginx. On Debian and any of its derivatives you can also test the
configuration by invoking the init script as: /etc/init.d/nginx testconfig
.
I have created a small shell script that parses your php.ini
and
sets a sane environment, be it for development or
production settings.
Grab it here.
-
Improve the documentation. It's too vague and needs to be more elaborate.
-
Add AgrCache support. (D7)
The great bunch at the Nginx group on groups.drupal.org. They've helped me sort out the snafus on this config and offered insights on how to improve it.
Thanks to Richard for setting me down the path of image hotlinking protection.