Thread

While most of my recent CMS work has been in Drupal (don’t throw things at me!), textpattern was my favorite CMS back ~2005 and expression engine’s philosophy has always appealed to me. I’ve been using EE on a quick/simple personal project (http://brokensky.net/) and want to port it over from shared hosting to a VPS on Linode, as well as play with EE for another (non-commercial) project or two. The server runs LEMP compatible stack: mariadb, php, nginx. I’m liking the low RAM imprint of nginx but I’m still not as comfortable with it as I am with apache, and I’m having problems getting EE to run on it, which is compounded by the fact nginx has been tweaked a bit by a server setup script I’m using for my existing drupal/aegir setup.

I’ve made tweaks here and there (csf, sshd_config, etc) but for the most part my environment follows that automated script generated by the BARRACUDA.sh.txt file @ https://github.com/omega8cc/nginx-for-drupal

I can run static html fine in a custom vhost/subdomain, the server test script you provide runs and passes (url segments are missing, but everything else is there), but EE itself just hits a blank white page and downloads index.php or has a two lines of unstyled text (which I lamely forgot to copy).  I’ve tried modifying http://wiki.nginx.org/ExpressionEngine with my local path/domain with no avail, and/or swapping out bits of it with an existing working vhost rule for a php app.

relevant bits of server config files (sanitized IP and domains) here: https://gist.github.com/810908

this seems similar to http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/175628/
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/164052/ again doesn’t solve my issue

Moved to CodeShare Corner by Moderator

erutan,

but EE itself just hits a blank white page and downloads index.php or has a two lines of unstyled text (which I lamely forgot to copy).

Can you reply with those 2 lines please?
Anything showing up in your error log?

Have you actually started the install yet?
What version and build are you using?
To start the install you need to goto yoursite.com/system/

We don’t support server set-ups but any info like the above EE related questions may lead to more clues as to the behaviour you have at the moment

The two lines were one symptom, it’s back to just serving index.php as a download now - the message was something generic about configuration. EE nginx error logs just had errors relating to not being able to find favicon.ico.  going to the install directory has the same behaviour as the base directory.  version is 2.13, not sure where the build info is but I downloaded it in mid-late january.

It feels like a mimetype issue or something, but it’s odd I can run the server config wizard from the same subdomain fine, and static html content works as expected… the basic server itself is running fine, drupal/aegir and chive work as expected as well (on different subdomains/domains obviously).

Hi, erutan. I’m not familiar with nginx. You mention low ram requirements.

How much memory is allocated to PHP? You’d have to create a phpinfo file to figure that out..

It’s safely high heh, 256M. nginx is something I’ve come to like as dealing with varnish has given me headaches and for mediumish scale sites I’d prefer to just use nginx+in-cms caching than apache+varnish+in-cms caching for scalability. nginx is v 0.9.3.

I suppose I could just install apache on the server for EE and bump up my server RAM if/when necessary, but for now my EE stuff is non-commercial so that’s kind of meh. If no one here knows nginx well then it’s probably worth my money rather than spending time hacking away at it after a few more tries, as I haven’t done much heavy config with nginx myself. I’d prob want to scale up at some point anyways, though what I have planned for the short term on the server will be fairly lowish traffic sites.

fyi -

free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        510652     489960      20692          0      41796     300256
-/+ buffers/cache:     147908     362744
Swap:       524280          0     524280

Hi, erutan. Tell you what, let’s move this thread to the CodeShare Corner where there are more community members available to help out..

Sounds good.

I’ll most likely just set up nginx as a proxy for apache, I’ll let you know how it turns out.

http://www.debian-administration.org/article/649/Speeding_up_dynamic_websites_via_an_nginx_proxy (but forward requests by domain rather than filetype).