Install Moodle On Ubuntu with Nginx/PHP-fpm

This is a starting guide to install Moodle with Nginx/PHP-fpm/Postgres on the latest Ubuntu LTS. It is important to take note that Moodle is heavily tested on Apache2 environment, not on Nginx environment. This document is for people having previously installed a Moodle site and a Ubuntu distribution, and having some basic knowledge of Linux command lines (vim, linux permissions..).

Nginx

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install nginx

sudo mkdir -p /home/nginx/localhost/{public,private,log,backup}

sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/default server {

       root /home/nginx/localhost/public;
       index index.html index.htm index.php;

       server_name yourdomainname.com;

       location / {
               # First attempt to serve request as file, then
               # as directory, then fall back to index.html
               try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
       }

       location ~ \.php$ {
               fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
               fastcgi_index index.php;
               include fastcgi_params;
       }

}

Postgres 9.0.3

sudo apt-get install autoconf2.13 libssl-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libjpeg62-dev libpng12-dev libmysql++-dev libfreetype6-dev libt1-dev libc-client-dev libevent-dev libxml2-dev libtool libmcrypt-dev
Note: also required to compiling PHP.

cd /usr/local/src

sudo apt-get install build-essential libreadline6-dev zlib1g-dev

wget http://wwwmaster.postgresql.org/redir/333/h/source/v9.0.3/postgresql-9.0.3.tar.gz

tar zxvf postgresql-9.0.3.tar.gz

cd postgresql-9.0.3

./configure

make

sudo make install

sudo vim /etc/profile Add to the end of /etc/profile: export PATH="/usr/local/pgsql/bin:${PATH}"

source /etc/profile

sudo adduser postgres

sudo mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data

sudo chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data

sudo su postgres

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb-E UTF8 -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl start -D /usr/local/pgsql/data

exit

psql -U postgres

\password

createdb -E UTF8 -O postgres -T template0 -U postgres moodle

\q

PHP 5.3.3

Note: if you use postgres to not take PHP 5.3.5, pg_set_client_encoding() will crash with a http 500 error.

sudo apt-get install libltdl-dev

cd /usr/local/src

sudo wget -O php-5.3.3.tar.gz http://us.php.net/get/php-5.3.3.tar.gz/from/us.php.net/mirror/

tar zxvf php-5.3.3.tar.gz

cd php-5.3.3

./configure --enable-fpm --with-gd --with-mcrypt --enable-mbstring --with-openssl --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/lib --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-libxml-dir=/usr/lib --with-curl --enable-zip --enable-sockets --with-zlib --enable-exif --enable-ftp --with-iconv --with-gettext --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-t1lib=/usr --with-freetype-dir=/usr --prefix=/usr/local/php --with-fpm-user=www-data --with-fpm-group=www-data --with-pgsql=/usr/local/pgsql --enable-tokenizer --with-xmlrpc --enable-soap --enable-ctype

Note: this is to support postgres. TODO: intl extension is not enabled.

sudo make

sudo make install

sudo cp php.ini-production /usr/local/php/lib/php.ini

sudo chmod 644 /usr/local/php/lib/php.ini

sudo cp /usr/local/php/etc/php-fpm.conf.default /usr/local/php/etc/php-fpm.conf

sudo cp sapi/fpm/init.d.php-fpm /etc/init.d/php-fpm

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/php-fpm

sudo update-rc.d -f php-fpm defaults

sudo touch /var/run/php-fpm.pid

sudo vim /etc/init.d/php-fpm change location of pid (remove ${prefix}) to: php_fpm_PID=/var/run/php-fpm.pid

sudo vim /usr/local/php/etc/php-fpm.conf Changes these values

---

pid = /var/run/php-fpm.pid error_log = /var/log/php-fpm.log

---

Uncomment the lines for:

---

pm.start_servers = 20 pm.min_spare_servers = 5 pm.max_spare_servers = 35

sudo service php-fpm start

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

vim /home/nginx/localhost/public/index.php Enter: <?php phpinfo(); ?>

Check it is available.

APC

With APC, Moodle will be a lot faster.

sudo /usr/local/php/bin/pecl config-set php_ini /usr/local/php/lib/php.ini

sudo /usr/local/php/bin/pecl install apc

sudo vim /usr/local/php/lib/php.ini add (if not already existing): extension=apc.so

Moodle

Install Moodle into /home/nginx/localhost/public/. Note that it is recommended to install Git and to get the Moodle files with Git.

In the Moodle administration, disable 'slash arguments' (http://YOURMOODLESITE/admin/search.php?query=slashargument).

More to do

• follow Moodle security page
• Secure SSH (see this slicehost debian setup page)
• Enable SSL (you can use to install a free SSL certificate with startSSL)
• Setup firewall (ubuntu documentation)
• Install SMTP server (Ubuntu documentation with working main.cf, Linode documentation, documentation about MX-record)

There are still a lot more to do (setting up your domain name, establishing a maintenance plan, performance tweaking...). Be patient and have fun.

Related document

• Nginx/PHP-fpm blog post
• Compiling Postgres 9 blog post