Installing PHP and Nginx on Mac OSX

Warning: this post is old and might not reflect the current state of the art

I’ll cover installing PHP on OSX via Homebrew on Nginx and PHP-FPM.

Homebrew is the best package manager for OSX and it will help keeping everything up to date.

Install Homebrew

First install Homebrew if you don’t have it installed.

Install Nginx

In the terminal type

brew install nginx

The default settings are:

Config:       /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Servers info: /usr/local/etc/nginx/servers/
Docroot:      /usr/local/var/www
Port:         8080

Add it to the Launch Agents to be started when starting up the system:

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/nginx/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

Now launch it

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist

All should be fine.

Add this to /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf. Make sure to change /Users/flavio/www to your sites root folder. This allows access to all the sites, which will be accessible via subfolders.

#user  nobody;
worker_processes  1;

#error_log  logs/error.log;
#error_log  logs/error.log  notice;
#error_log  logs/error.log  info;
#pid        logs/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    include       sites-enabled/*; # load virtuals config
    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    #log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
    #                  '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
    #                  '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    #access_log  logs/access.log  main;

    # gzip  on;
    # gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";

    server {
        listen       8080;
        server_name  localhost;

        #charset koi8-r;
        #access_log  logs/host.access.log  main;

        location / {
            root  /Users/flavio/www;
            try_files  $uri  $uri/  /index.php?$args ;
            index  index.php;
            #root   html;
            index  index.html index.htm;
        }

        # configure *.PHP requests

        location ~ \.php$ {
            root  /Users/flavio/www;
            try_files  $uri  $uri/  /index.php?$args ;
            index  index.html index.htm index.php;
            fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
            fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

            fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index index.php;
            fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
            fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
            include fastcgi_params;
        }

        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
            deny  all;
        }
    }
}

Restart with sudo nginx -s reload and access http://localhost:8080/ and you should see Nginx running. PHP sites will fail at this point.

Install PHP 7

brew install php70

Add it to the Launch Agents to be started when starting up the system:

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/php56/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

Now launch it

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.php71.plist

All should be fine.

Refresh http://localhost:8080/ and access a PHP site, PHP should be running fine!

Install Opcache

brew install php71-opcache

Install APCu

brew install php71-apcu

Allow using port 80

sudo chown root:wheel ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.nginx.plist

Nginx Logs

/usr/local/var/log/nginx/

Download my free books, and check out my upcoming Full-Stack JavaScript Bootcamp! A 4-months online training program. Signups now open, until June 1!

---