PHP 5.6 with Nginx on AWS

Look whether the version you like is available. For a producion server you may not want to install the very latest.

yum search php56
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Here I have gone for php56 i.e. php-5.6 as I needed it for the latest mediawiki I was looking to install for my documentation.

sudo service php-fpm stop
sudo yum remove php-*
sudo yum install php56
yum list installed | grep php
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You may want the following extenstions

sudo yum install php56-xml php56-xmlrpc php56-soap php56-gd
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You may like to install the mysql server

sudo yum install php56-mysqlnd 
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(NOTE: it is apparently not php56-mysql )

sudo vim /etc/php-fpm-5.6.d/www.conf
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change the user and group to nginx. Then edit or create your nginx configuration file

sudo vim /etc/nginx/conf.d/yourserver.conf
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This is mine.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name your_domain_name;
    root /srv/sites/your_domain_name;
    index index.php index.html;

    client_max_body_size 5m;
    client_body_timeout 60;

    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri :404;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; 
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root/$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
        try_files $uri /index.php;
        expires max;
        log_not_found off;
    }

    location : /_.gif {
        expires max;
        empty_gif;
    }

    location ^~ /cache/ {
        deny all;
    }

    location /dumps {
        root /srv/sites/Alfred Tuinman.odyssey.co.in;
        autoindex on;
    }
}
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You need to verify permissions and ownership of the document root. It is best to create a small phpinfo.php page in your root for testing

<?php
phpinfo();
?>
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and then you can start testing

sudo service php-fpm-5.6 start
sudo service nginx restart
php -v
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This highlighted again for me how great it would be if I would improve my knowledge of Chef, the DevOps tool, as I am certain I overlooked some steps that I would like to have recorded. After all a five minite job took me now 2 hours. In short, I have to do it again on a fresh server.