Justin Carmony has a new tutorial posted to his blog today about setting up Nginx and PHP-FPM on Ubuntu in a few easy steps (thanks to some package management).

This is another wonderful setup that I've found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup. [...] Ngnix, unlike Apache, doesn't actually load PHP. Instead, it hands it off as a proxy to a "php handler" which acts like an Application Server. So nginx by itself won't serve PHP files, but just static files.

He briefly introduces Nginx and PHP-FPM for those not familiar and points out that this combination is very fast, even without much configuration. The packages are installed with the aptitude installer and minimal changes are made to the php-fm and nginx configuration files (mostly to set up whatever your domain/virtual host is).

In a recent post to his blog Mark Hamlin talks about some of his difficulties in getting XDebug and Netbeans working together from an OSX machine hitting a Ubuntu server.

For the past 18 months working with PHP, i've primarily used alternatives, not out of preference, but because netbeans xdebug integration consistently failed me. It would (might) work with a remote apache, but would not play with scripts executed remotely from the command line. I could be fairly sure my xdebug config was sound as I no problems with MacGDB and PHPStorm whatsoever.

With a little more investigation, he discovered that it was the OSX firewall causing issues. He found that, with a new incoming connection came a confirmation box to approve the connection. This, of course, wasn't passed along to Netbeans so he never saw it. In the end, he set up a reverse SSH tunnel to bypass the firewall completely (command included).

On the HowToForge.com site there's a new tutorial stepping you through the process of getting Cherokee+PHP+MySQL working on an Ubuntu linux installation.

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

The tutorial makes use of the package manager (apt-get) to install the needed software, so don't look for complete compiling information from this process. They include a bit of the configuration of the Cherokee installation and how you enable PHP support via its interface. Screenshots of the Cherokee interface are included to help make it easier to follow along.

Andrew Johnstone came across an interesting problem when he tried to use memcached multigets with a large number of keys - it was throwing failures, but only when he tried it on Ubuntu.

I Spent a little while yesterday investigating why memcached causes problems with multigets returning results and ended up comparing debian vs ubuntu. [...] A larger number of keys than 200 causes memcached to fail to return valid responses, additionally the key length greatly varies the number items you can pull back within a single multiget on Ubuntu, Debian implementation of memcached is able to handle all requests regardless of key length size.

He includes the code for his brief test and the output of the test runs on both Ubuntu and Debian systems. They clearly show the failures on the Ubunut side, with it throwing errors about "memcached_oi_read" and a zero length value returned to recv().

Elvin Haci has a recent post to his blog showing how he set up PHP and Python to work on the same machine, just on different ports of the same Apache instance. His example is based on Ubuntu, but the principles can be used just about anywhere.

Today i decided to install Python in Ubuntu OS and to use PHP and Python both together. If i hadn't installed php and wanted to have python as only localhost in my OS, so it was easy, there are plenty of examples which show how to do it(for example). But if you have already installed php and you want to have python, then let's go on. Of course we need two different ports if we want to do so. And i could easily install and test it. So i am sharing how i did it.

He includes all of the commands and configuration changes you'll need to get Python and Apache all set up (he assumes you already have PHP installed). He also includes a full listing of his Apache config file so you can get a feel of how it all fits together using the VirtualHosts.

If you're a user of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) and are needing to get a full LAMP stack up and running, you're in luck. Omar Abdallah has put together a guide to help with just that.

I wont cover what's new in php 5.3 since it would be another article, however it contains alot of improvements including PHP Namespaces, Late Static Bindings, lambda functions, closures...etc. I would strongly recommend using it. I'll be explaining how to install LAMP stack with PHP 5.3.6 without compiling. It's fairly easy using the dotdeb repository.

He steps you through adding the dotdeb package locations to your plist file and pulling down the GPG key for the connection. The rest is a simple "aptitude install" command away, pulling in the apache2, mysql, php5, mcrypt, curl, gd and phpmyadmin packages.

Hannes Magnusson, in an effort to make it easier for developers to play with the latest shiny features of the current PHP development, has created a PPA for the latest daily status of the PHP project's trunk line of code.

There is still no public "development preview" or alpha release, but that doesn't mean we can't play around with it, report bugs, ensuring our apps still properly work with it etc etc etc. It is however a bit annoying needing to "go old-school" and fetch a snapshot and build it yourself though.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself (the generated Ubuntu packages), you can get more information over on the Launchpad page for the project. As always, feedback is welcome on the PHP internals list about your experiences.

In a new post to his blog Hannes Magnusson mentions that the PHP packages for Ubuntu linux installs are woefully out of date and can make a developer's live even more difficult than it already can be. It help ease the situation a bit, he's figured out how to provide custom PHP 5.3 packages to anyone who wants them through a service called Launchpad.

Launchpad makes it really easy to provide your own custom packages, and even has a vast build farm to build packages automatically for different architectures and different Ubuntu releases. The only down side is it doesn't build rpm packages.. Thats fine by me, but that would be really useful for those wishing to deploy on a RedHat based distro.

He took the current package and pulled out a lot of the setup to make a "vanilla" installation. You can then look over at the PHP 5.3 PPA he's provided on his Launchpad account and grab this most up to date package.

David Behler has provided a complete guide to helping you get a development virtual machine instance up and running quickly complete with Apache, PHP, MySQL and Samba shares to access your files.

I know that no server is like the other and you might still run into some problems due to different library versions and so on, but you gotta admit that two Linux servers have way more in common than a Linux and a Windows server. So in this post I'll tell you how to setup your own VM with all the libs you need. Even if you haven't worked with Linux before, you should be able to follow this tutorial/example easily.

He uses an image from thoughtpolice as the base and walks you through every step of the way. He shows you how to log in as root, update all packages and start installing the software you'll need (all via apt-get). There's even a sample Samba configuration file you can use to get started. The end result of all of this setup can be found in this image too.

Lorna Mitchell has a (very) quick post on getting Gearman installed for PHP on an Ubuntu linux system - as easy as a few package install calls, really.

I've been using Gearman lately in a project that I'm working on, and of course a month later when I came to deploy the code, I had to look up all over again what was required for a gearman server in order to put it on the new platform. Here is the short version for my future reference (and yours, if you like)

It's an easy two-step process - one to install the Gearman packages (binaries and development) via aptitude and the other using the pecl command to install the gearman-beta package and compile it. All goes well, you should be up and running with Gearman in just a few minutes.