AWS: Install PHP-FPM, Nginx, & MySQL on EC2 with Amazon Linux AMI

A step by step tutorial on installing and configuring PHP-FPM, Nginx, & MySQL on an Amazon EC2 instance running Amazon Linux AMI. The procedure has been tested on Amazon Linux AMI, but should also apply in general to Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS distributions. A brief introduction to FastCGI, PHP-FPM, and Nginx was posted in the article Understanding PHP, PHP-FPM and Nginx.

1. Install Linux updates, set time zones, followed by GCC and Make

sudo yum -y update
sudo ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Singapore \
      /etc/localtime
sudo yum install -y gcc make

2. Install Nginx and PHP-FPM

sudo yum install -y nginx php-fpm

3. Install PHP extensions

sudo yum install -y php-devel php-mysql php-pdo \
      php-pear php-mbstring php-cli php-odbc \
      php-imap php-gd php-xml php-soap

4. Install PHP-APC

sudo yum install -y php-pecl-apc
sudo yum install -y pcre-devel

5. Install MySQL

sudo yum -y install mysql-server mysql

6. Nginx Configuration

sudo nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf

If you want the location of your web root in the default Amazon Linux AMI directory (/var/www/html):

location / {
    root   /var/www/html;
    index  index.php index.html index.htm;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
      fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
      fastcgi_index  index.php;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /usr/share/nginx/
                       html$fastcgi_script_name;
      include        fastcgi_params;
  }

If you want the location of your web root in the default Nginx directory (/usr/share/nginx/html):

location / {
    root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
    index  index.php index.html index.htm;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
      fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
      fastcgi_index  index.php;
      fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /usr/share/nginx/
                       html$fastcgi_script_name;
      include        fastcgi_params;
  }

7. PHP-FPM Configuration

sudo nano /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

[...]
;listen = 127.0.0.1:9000
listen = /var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock
;listen.owner = nobody
listen.owner = nginx
;listen.group = nobody
listen.group = nginx
;listen.mode = 0666
listen.mode = 0664

user = nginx
group = nginx
[...]

8. Auto Start Nginx, PHP-FPM, and MySQL in EC2 Amazon Linux

sudo chkconfig nginx on
sudo chkconfig mysqld on
sudo chkconfig php-fpm on

9. Auto Start Nginx, PHP-FPM, and MySQL in EC2 Amazon Linux

sudo service php-fpm start
sudo service nginx start

if everything is well, you go to the root of your address, it will show you the start page of nginx.

Categories: AWS, PHP and Yii