Adventures in IT

Image: Pixabay Although I'm currently playing with Elixir and its HTTP servers like Cowboy at the moment Nginx is still my go-to server for production PHP. If you haven't already swapped your web-server from Apache then you really should consider installing Nginx on a test server and running some stress tests on it.  I wrote about stress testing in my book on scaling PHP . Redirecting non-www traffic to www in nginx is best accomplished by using the "return" verb.  You could use a rewrite but the Nginx manual suggests that a return is better in the section on " Taxing Rewrites ". Server blocks are cheap in Nginx and I find it's simplest to have two redirects for the person who arrives on the non-secure non-canonical form of my link.  I wouldn't expect many people to reach this link because obviously every link that I create will be properly formatted so being redirected twice will only affect a small minority of people. Anyway, here's...

Reverse Proxy diagram from Wiki Commons We're currently hosting client sites on a Rackspace server and using their Load Balancer feature as a way to terminate SSL and not have to have multisite certificates. We only attach one node to the Load Balancer so we're paying for more than we're using.  My proof of concept is to use Nginx to terminate SSL certificates and proxy to the Apache server.  This will save us £ 225 per load balancer, and since we're using ten of them that's quite a significant saving. My first step was to spin up a free tier EC2 instance running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.  I guess you can replace this with your favourite cloud or on-the-metal server. Then I installed my packages. These are the ones I remember so YMMV. sudo apt-get install nginx apache2 fail2ban php5-fpm mcrypt php5-mcrypt openssl php5-cli php5 libapache2-mod-php My network diagram is slightly different from the picture for this post in that the web server is hosted on the ...

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 ...

I've just set up a new nginx host and was having problems with visiting it. Whenever I loaded the page it would download a copy of my index file. In my case the problem was two-fold.  Firstly I had mistyped my server name so it was falling back to an alternative catchall. Secondly Chromium has a "won't fix" bug whereby redirects are cached.  Interestingly the cache also persisted into Incognito mode. Clearing my cache with the "Clear Browsing History" menu function didn't work to clear out the redirect cache.  This gave the symptom of stopping nginx, stopping varnish, and even stopping hhvm but still having Chromium download the file when I tried to visit it. What did work was to affix a get variable to the link.  So instead of visiting http://mysite.local I tried http://mysite.local?foo=1 which invalidated the cache. This wasn't an entirely satisfactory solution so the next thing I tried was to use the developer tools (ctrl shift I) a...