Using PHP4 with the Zeus Web Server ----------------------------------- Zeus fully supports running PHP in combination with our webserver. There are three different interfaces that can be used to enable PHP: * CGI * ISAPI * FastCGI Of the three, we recommend using FastCGI, which has been tested and benchmarked as providing the best performance and reliability. Full details of how to install PHP are available from our website, at: http://support.zeus.com/products/php.html If you have any problems, please check the support site for more up-to-date information and advice. Quick guide to installing CGI/FastCGI with Zeus ----------------------------------------------- Step 1 - Compile PHP as FastCGI. Compile as follows: ./configure --enable-fastcgi make Note that PHP has many options to the configure script - e.g. --with-mysql. You will probably want to select your usual options before compiling; the above is just a bare minimum, for illustration. After compilation finishes, you will be left with an executable program called 'php'. Copy this into your document root, under a dedicated FastCGI directory (e.g. $DOCROOT/fcgi-bin/php) Step 2 - configure Zeus Four stages: - enable FastCGI - configure FastCGI - setup alias for FastCGI - setup alias for PHP 1) Using the admin server, go to the 'module configuration' page for your virtual server, and ensure that 'fastcgi' is enabled (select the tickbox to the left). 2) While we can run FastCGI's locally, there are known problems with some OS's (specifically, the communication between web server and FastCGI happens over a unix domain socket, and some OS's have trouble sustaining high connection rates over these sockets). So instead, we are going to set up the PHP FastCGI to run 'remotely' over localhost (this uses TCP sockets, which do not suffer this problem). Go to the 'fastcgi configuration' page, and under 'add remote fastcgi': Add Remote FastCGI Docroot path /fcgi-bin/php Remote machine localhost:8002 The first entry is where you saved PHP, above. The second entry is localhost: We will start the FastCGI listening on this port shortly. Click 'update' to commit these changes. 3) Go to the path mapping module and add an alias for FastCGI: Add Alias Docroot path /fcgi-bin Filesystem directory /path/to/docroot/fcgi-bin Alias type fastcgi Click 'update' to commit these changes 4) Also on the path mapping module, add a handler for PHP: Add handler File extension php Handler /fcgi-bin/php Click 'update' to commit these changes Finally restart your virtual server for these changes to take effect. Step 3 - start PHP as a FastCGI runner When you start PHP, it will pre-fork a given number of child processes to handle incoming PHP requests. Each process will handle a given number of requests before exiting (and being replaced by a newly forked process). You can control these two parameters by setting the following environment variables BEFORE starting the FastCGI runner: PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN - the number of child processes to pre-fork. This variable MUST be set, if not then the PHP will not run as a FastCGI. We recommend a value of 8 for a fairly busy site. If you have many, long-running PHP scripts, then you may need to increase this further. PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS - the number of requests each PHP child process handles before exiting. If not set, defaults to 500. To start the FastCGI runner, execute '$ZEUSHOME/web/bin/fcgirunner 8002 $DOCROOT/fcgi-bin/php'. Substitute the appropriate values for $ZEUSHOME and $DOCROOT; also substitute for 8002 the port you chose, above. To stop the runner (e.g. to experiment with the above environment variables) you will need to manually stop and running PHP processes. (Use 'ps' and 'kill'). As it is PHP which is forking lots of children and not the runner, Zeus unfortunately cannot keep track of what processes are running, sorry. A typical command line may look like 'ps -efl | grep $DOCROOT/fcgi-bin/php | grep -v grep | awk '{print $4}' | xargs kill'