Configure NGinx to serve static files and Apache for dynamic

CentOS 6.x

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
Now that the repo is installed, we need to install NGinx

yum install nginx

Configuring NGinx

Now that NGinx is installed we need to create a VirtualHost (actually NGinx calls them Server Blocks) for each site we are hosting.

nano /etc/nginx/conf.d/virtual.conf
#Insert one of these for each of the virtualhosts you have configured in Apache

server {
 listen 80;
root /path/to/site/root; 
 index index.php index.html index.htm;
server_name www.yourdomain.com yourdomain.com;
location / {
 try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;
 }
location ~ \.php$ {
 
 proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
 proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;
 proxy_set_header Host $host;
 proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;

}

location ~ /\.ht {
 deny all;
 }
}

This configuration tells NGinx to try and serve the requested file, but to pass the request onto Apache if it's unable to do so. Requests for PHP files should be forwarded automatically. Apache will be told who requested the file in the 'X-Forwarded-For' header.

The final section tells NGinx not to check requests for .htaccess files as no one want anyone to see the contents of these.


Configuring Apache

We want users to hit our NGinx installation (otherwise this effort is wasted) but Apache is currently sat on port 80. So we're going to move it to 8080 (given that's the port we specified in the NGinx configuration we created).

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
# Find the following
Listen (someIP) 80
# Change the port to
Listen 127.0.0.1 8080

# Now at the bottom of the file, you'll find your virtualhost directives,
# Change all port definitions of 80 to 8080
# Don't forget the Default virtualhost definition
# <virtualhost *:80> becomes <virtualhost *:8080>

We change the Listen address as we don't want external hosts to access Apache directly, everything should go through NGinx. Ideally, we also want to forbid outside access to port 8080 at the firewall to ensure that the point of entry to our system is restricted to the authorised route - through NGinx.

Start the Services
We've now configured Apache to listen on a different port, so all we need to do know is restart Apache (so that it moves to port 8080) and start NGinx so that it can start handling requests.

service httpd restart
service nginx start
Now if you browse to your site, nothing should have changed visibly. However, if you check the HTTP headers you should see NGinx instead of Apache, checking a phpinfo file should still show Apache as having called the PHP parser though.