It’s been a while since I last posted something here.

Recently got interested in the “beastie” aka BSD one flavor of UNIX, not say I’m no longer loving the penguin but then it’s good to know more systems out there and FreeBSD is one of the most well know systems for stability and uptime of like 5 years without restarting. So here is how to get it up with Nginx, PHP and MySQL, running inside a VMware environment.

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The first thing to do is to get portsnap to do a update from the port tree.

portsnap fetch extract update

Most of the popular applications will be in the ports tree so most of these installation can be automated without much issues.

Installing VMware Tools

Installing Perl5.16

/usr/ports/lang/perl5.16/
make config-recursive
make install clean

Install compat6x

/usr/ports/misc/compat6x/
make config-recursive
make install clean

Manual installation of 2 VMware modules

“Insert” the vmware tools disc, and mount using type cd9660 as such

mount -t cd9600 /dev/cd0 /mnt

then access the mounted disc and copy the tool file to somewhere locally for extraction.

<DIR>vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/

Untar the following, make and make install them before installing the main perl script

vmmemctl.tar
vmblock.tar

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Installing Bash-completion

Firstly will be the installation of  “bash-completion” as I find “csh” not that friendly, plus tab-ing is the way to go… 🙂

cd /usr/ports/shells/bash-completion
make config-recursive

No additional selections is necessary (defaults are alright)

make install clean

Then you have to change the default shell of the user by using

chpass

and change the Shell to

/usr/local/bin/bash

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Installing VIM

And how can we go about a Unix/Linux system without VIM? vi is just quite painful to use. And since I’m using this machine as a server, I don’t need gvim so vim-lite is suffice.

cd /usr/ports/editors/vim-lite
make config-recursive
make install clean

Do remember to configure your own ~/.vimrc

syntax on
set background=dark
set shiftwidth=2
set tabstop=2
set nocompatible
set expandtab
set autoindent
set ruler
if has("autocmd")
 filetype plugin indent on
endif
set showcmd " Show (partial) command in status line.
set showmatch " Show matching brackets.
set ignorecase " Do case insensitive matching
set smartcase " Do smart case matching
set incsearch " Incremental search
set hidden " Hide buffers when they are abandoned
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set mouse=

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Installing wget

cd /usr/ports/ftp/wget
make config-recursive
make install clean

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Installing PHP

cd /usr/ports/lang/php5
make config-recursive
make install clean

You will also have to install php extenstions for things like session, mbstring, mycrypt, mysql, mysqli and etc.

cd /usr/ports/lang/php5-extensions
make config-recursive
make install clean

Configuring PHP-FPM

vim /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf

events.mechanism = kqueue

listen = /var/run/php-fpm.sock

listen.owner = www
listen.group = www
listen.mode = 0666

You will also have to configure the php.ini for your needs, I need to set my local timezone

cp /usr/local/etc/php.ini-production /usr/local/etc/php.ini

vim /usr/local/etc/php.ini

date.timezone = Asia/Singapore

You will have to add the following line into the rc.conf.

vim /etc/rc.conf

php_fpm_enable="YES"

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Installing nginx

cd /usr/ports/www/nginx
make config-recursive
make install clean

Configuring nginx

vim /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Some things that needs to be included are the use of kqueue which is used in BSD.

events {
 worker_connections 1024;
 use kqueue;
}

location ~ .php$ {
 #root html;
 #fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
 fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm.sock;
 #fastcgi_index index.php;
 fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/local/www$fastcgi_script_name;
 fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
 include fastcgi_params;
}

You will have to add the following line into the rc.conf.

vim /etc/rc.conf

nginx_enable="YES"

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Installing MySQL

Depending on requirements, the choice of MySQL configuration will be different, pick the most suitable one and copy it.

cp /usr/local/share/mysql/my-small.cnf /usr/local/etc/my.cnf

Manually start MySQL server to install and configure it.

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server start

Follow the guide from the secure installation script.

mysql_secure_installation

You will have to add the following line into the rc.conf.

vim /etc/rc.conf

mysql_enable="YES"

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Installing Web-apps

After completing the above installation, it should be a breeze to install the rest of the web-apps like phpMyAdmin and WordPress, just place them at the correct place /usr/local/www 🙂