Local LEMP development [Tutorial]

onyxnz · September 18, 2020, 3:41am

EOS LEMP Web development platform

To make things easier for myself as a PHP web developer I set up localhost to be my web server and develop locally before uploading files to the necessary server. This works very effectively using the LEMP stack ( Linux NGINX MariaDB PHP ), which in my experience is faster than LAMP / Apache.

Disclaimer:
You need to be at least slightly familiar with PHP, and the command line in order to work this. In the examples below I will use “mydomain.local” as the example domain to develop for; change it to yours. Likewise with “username”.
This is not the most secure way of setting up a webserver; it’s not supposed to be, it’s supposed to be the easiest to work with in offline development.
I welcome any critique and corrections to this guide, but I have found this has worked for me running under Antergos/EOS for the last 2+ years and similar configuration on Mint/Debian for the last 10 years.

Concept one:
Your /etc/hosts file controls how your machine sees the internet and domain names. You are going to develop for a specific domain name, so the best way to control this is by modifying the /etc/hosts file.
Add a line to it to control access to the domain name mydomain.local like this:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
add:
127.0.0.1 mydomain.local
ctrl-x, y, enter

Concept two:
In almost every other tutorial for local development they will suggest that you are keeping the website files in /var/www or similar. This has some drawbacks that are significant, in that it is outside your easily backed-up /home folders. Unfortunately I have not managed to get MariaDB to be happy about moving it’s DB files, so you need to have a database backup plan.

Concept three:
Updates to systemd have historically borked my methods here, so lookout for that as an answer if things stop working for you. I list one such fix below.

NB: // below denotes a comment

Recipe

// updates system first
sudo pacman -Syu

// install nginx
sudo pacman -S nginx-mainline

// enable the nginx service
sudo systemctl enable nginx

// stop the service if it is already running, because we’re going to change things…
sudo systemctl stop nginx

// install mariaDB
sudo pacman -S mariadb

// initialize the database
sudo mysql_install_db --user=mysql --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql

// enable and start mariadb
sudo systemctl enable mariadb && systemctl start mariadb

// set a root user password for mariadb, answer Y to all
mysql_secure_installation

// login to mariadb with the root password just set, type quit to exit
mysql -u root -p

// install php
sudo pacman -S php php-fpm

// enable php
sudo systemctl enable php-fpm

// now we will set our custom directories for working files, working within our home folder gives us all rights
mkdir ~/htdocs
mkdir ~/htdocs/sites
mkdir ~/htdocs/database
mkdir ~/htdocs/backups
mkdir ~/htdocs/errorpages
mkdir ~/htdocs/logs
mkdir ~/htdocs/sites-enabled
mkdir ~/htdocs/tmp

// phpmyadmin: it is possible to use the package manager to install phpmyadmin. However I prefer to install it separately like so:
cd ~/htdocs/database
wget https://www.phpmyadmin.net/downloads/phpMyAdmin-latest-all-languages.tar.gz
tar -zxvf phpMy*
ls -la php*
// see what the directory retrieved from the tar.gz is called, then move it to be pma/, so the line below is only example!
mv phpMyAdmin-5.0.2-all-languages/ pma/
cd ~/htdocs/sites-enabled
nano pma.local

// Enter the following between the hashed lines, taking care to change the username to yours

##################################################################################

server {

	root /home/username/htdocs/database/pma;

	index index.php;
	access_log /home/username/htdocs/logs/pma.local.access.log;
	error_log /home/username/htdocs/logs/pma.local.error.log;
	server_name pma.local;
	client_max_body_size 256M;
	location / {
		# First attempt to serve request as file, then
		# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
		try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
	}
	
	location ~ \.php$ {
    try_files $uri $document_root$fastcgi_script_name =404;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_read_timeout 180000;
    include fastcgi.conf;

    # prevention for httpoxy vulnerability: https://httpoxy.org/
    fastcgi_param HTTP_PROXY "";
}
	location ~ /\.ht {
		deny all;
	}
}

##################################################################################

ctrl-x, y, enter

// add pma.local to the hosts as per Concept One above
sudo nano /etc/hosts
// add:
127.0.0.1 pma.local
ctrl-x, y, enter

// now we can modify nginx config files to serve from our directories

sudo nano etc/nginx/nginx.conf

// Enter the following between the hashed lines, taking care to change the username to yours

##################################################################################

user username; # <--- this sets nginx up to run as you!
worker_processes  8;

error_log  /home/username/htdocs/logs/nginx-error.log info;

events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
	types_hash_max_size 1024;
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    access_log  /home/username/htdocs/logs/nginx-access.log;

    sendfile        on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    gzip  on;

    server { # <-- the default localhost server accessed through http://localhost
        listen       80; # <-- what TCP/IP port nginx will listen on
        server_name  localhost; <-- aka 127.0.0.1

        location / {
            root   /home/username/htdocs/sites/;  # <-- default root. Each development site should own another directory under this
            index  index.php index.html index.htm;  # <-- the filenames that nginx looks for as the default for a directory
            
        }

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   404 500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /home/username/htdocs/errorpages/;
        }

		location ~ \.php$ {
            root           /home/username/htdocs/sites/;
            fastcgi_pass   unix:/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
            include        fastcgi_params;
		}
	
    }


    # another virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration
    #
    #server {
    #    listen       8000;
    #    listen       somename:8080;
    #    server_name  somename  alias  another.alias;

    #    location / {
    #        root   html;
    #        index  index.html index.htm;
    #    }
    #}


    # HTTPS server  <-- example syntax only; there's not much point in using SSL connections locally
    #
    #server {
    #    listen       443 ssl;
    #    server_name  localhost;

    #    ssl_certificate      cert.pem;
    #    ssl_certificate_key  cert.key;

    #    ssl_session_cache    shared:SSL:1m;
    #    ssl_session_timeout  5m;

    #    ssl_ciphers  HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5;
    #    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers  on;

    #    location / {
    #        root   html;
    #        index  index.html index.htm;
    #    }
    #}
    
include sites-enabled/*;
include /home/username/htdocs/sites-enabled/*; # <-- we can easily create new site definitions in that folder and nginx will pick them up