Setting up the admin server in HHVM 3.6.0 and Nginx

Hiphop has a built-in admin server that has a lot of useful functions. I found out about it on an old post on the Hiphop blog.

Since those times Hiphop has moved towards using an ini file instead of a config.hdf file.

On a standard prebuilt HHVM on Ubuntu you should find the ini file in /etc/hhvm/php.ini

Facebook maintains a list of all the ini settings on Github.

It is into this file that we add two lines to enable the admin server:

 hhvm.admin_server.password = SecretPassword  
 hhvm.admin_server.port = 8888

I then added a server to Nginx by creating this file: /etc/nginx/conf.d/admin.conf (by default Nginx includes all conf files in that directory):

 server {  
   # hhvm admin  
   listen 8889;  
   location ~ {  
     fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:8888;  
     include    fastcgi_params;  
   }  
 }

Now I can run curl 'http://localhost:8889' from my shell on the box to get a list of commands. Because I host this project with Amazon and have not set up a security rule the port/server are not available to the outside world. You may want to check your firewall rules on your server.

To run a command add the password as a get variable:

 curl 'http://localhost:8889/check-health?auth=SecretPassword'

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