This new version of NGINX is tending to be a bit of a pain in terms of installation. Gone are the sites-available and sites-enabled folders and it does a couple of things during installation that really grips my goat.

Getting php5-fpm working with it needs some manipulation of the config. The site configs are now located under /etc/nginx/conf.d/ and they now have a .conf extension. The default being default.conf.

By default this config sticks the ‘root’ directive under the location /. Which when it comes to running php5-fpm and using fastcgi parameters causes a headache. It’s a simple fix, but put simply the previous use of $document_root will not work because the directive needs to be within the server context NOT location.

This will cause “File not found” messages and in the /var/log/nginx/error.log you find stuff that looks like this:

2016/09/20 13:51:18 [error] 4361#4361: *4 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Primary script unknown" while reading response header from upstream, client: 271.21.41.201, server: localhost, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock:", host: "myserver"

So just move the root line out so it’s outside the location context.

    location / {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index  index.php;
    }

So it’s like this:

    root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
    location / {
          index  index.php;
      }

Next you’ll need to sort out the php location, because by default that’s different too. This is how you could do it so it was as previous:

   # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server
    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_index  index.php;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        include        fastcgi_params;
    }

But because we have a fastcgi_params include, I’d put the line:

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

into /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params instead.

So after a bit of re-jigging we’re back to a running nginx web server with php5.