On the HowToForge.com site there's a new tutorial showing you how to get Cherokee, PHP and MySQL working on Ubuntu. Chreokee is a light-weight web server that has no dependencies beyond the standard C libraries.

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 9.10 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

They use the aptitude package manager to install all of the software needed - the MySQL server and client, Cherokee and PHP - and include some of the configuration options you'll need to change to get it all up and running. The PHP functionality is provided to the web server via the FastCGI installation. A few screenshots are thrown in to show the Cherokee web-based admin interface in action.

In a new post to the CatsWhoCode.com blog Jean-Babtiste Jung walks you through the creation of a simple monitoring script written using just PHP that can tell you if your web site is up and responsive.

In order to make sure that your website is always available to the public, you have to monitor it. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can easily create a monitoring script that will check your website availability and send an email or sms alert to you if it isn't.

They have a snippet of code (about 15 lines long) with a function you can call to check a remote host's connection and check the returned data for a certain string. This can not only ensure that your site is responsive but also that it's not responding incorrectly. You could even use this to hit a certain monitoring page of your site to check for certain things (like database connection problems).

In a new post today Mark van der Velden looks at how to run more than one PHP version on one web server.

This is a blog about running two PHP versions on one webserver and using multiple php.ini files, this combination can be a tricky one to tackle. But luckily one we can tackle quite easily as long as one of the PHP versions is >= 5.2.7. For this example I'll be using Apache, but the webserver flavor doesn't really matter. The most important part is the "PHP_INI_SCAN_DIR" environment variable.

He wanted to be able to run a specific version (or versions) on the web server for applications that depended on or required a certain PHP version - like one that was written in PHP4 that would have all sorts of quirks if moved to PHP5. You'll need to know a bit about installing packages and how to compile one of the versions yourself, but configuring the Apache httpd.conf is simple. Virtual hosts make it easy to define a specific version for different parts of the site.

New on the phpPro site is this article looking at a technique for embedding PHP inside of your CSS files and have it correctly interpreted.

Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of using PHP with websites, is getting variables into CSS. Having variables stored in an ini file, config file or even a database can make the updating of the look and feel of a site simple, however, CSS files, by default, do not parse PHP. [...] A html file may also include a PHP file, in the same manner as it includes a CSS file. This means the stylesheet can be renamed from style.css to style.php.

Using this method, the PHP inside the file is parsed and, because its included with a link tag, the CSS is also made available to the rest of the page.

After having moved servers just recently, Manuel Lemos has a few helpful hints for anyone out there considering a web site/web server move in the near future:

Despite the benefits of migrating to a better server, the actual migration is a complicated process that can fail in so many ways that I thought it would be a good idea to share what you need to be concerned if you need to migrate your servers too. You need to go through several steps that need to be done in the right order to prevent major headaches.

Here's his ten steps/recommendations of things to keep an eye on during the move:

• Prepare your DNS
• Setup the new server
• Tune the server file system for performance and integrity
• Install the base applications
• Initial data migration
• Put the old server in migration mode
• Bring your new server to life
• Double check your server security
• Epilogue (the final miscellaneous startup/setup items)
• The forgotten step that you remembered

In this new post from Chris Hartjes today he continues his look at combining a CakePHP application with the Nginx web server. This time the focus is on the configuration of the web server side of things to make the CakePHP routing work.

I'm in the process of creating the website for my upcoming book *and* had recently switched back from using Apache to using Nginx again, so I thought it might be time to roll up my sleeves and figure out how to make it work in a subdirectory. After much gnashing of teeth and pissing and moaning, I figured it out.

A simple configuration example is included as a part of the post showing how to correctly configure the rewrite routes to catch everything and send it back to the index.php file. His is a two-part process: it tries to match anything with "/foo" in it then, if it wasn't caught there, it sends it off to be rerouted to the front controller.

The PHP::Impact blog has a new post looking at how to run PHP on a Jetty (Java) web server using Quercus.

Tomcat and Jetty are very similar. Jetty can be invoked and installed as a stand alone application server. It has a flexible component based architecture that allows it to be easily deployed and integrated in a diverse range of instances. The project is supported by a growing community. The Jetty team has a history of being responsive to innovations and changing requirements.

They walk you through the "quick install" version of Jetty, getting it running, installing Quercus and configuring the Jetty web server to work with it.

Stuart Herbert, prompted by this post from Derick Rethans uses this new post to his blog to point out something that didn't seem to be mentioned and has always been a pet peeve of his when running PHP on IIS - controlling the FastCGI processes so they don't take over the machine.

Running PHP via CGI and FastCGI means that IIS has to do the Windows equivalent of fork()ing off PHP processes to do the actual PHP bit. If your box has too many PHP processes running, the box will start to swap. Once a webserver starts swapping, you've no chance in hell of keeping up with all the incoming requests, and your websites on that particular webserver become unavailable in a matter of moments.

The problem seems to have been corrected in the most recent IIS release, though and correct directions can be found here. Older versions of the web server are out of luck, unfortunately.

Kevin van Zonneveld has passed along a note about one of his latest posts to his blog, this overview of how virtualization on the desktop can help you make stronger, improved code.

If you have to wait endlessly for on SVN commits, uploads or compile steps, you will simply produce less inventive code. [...] If there's one thing I've really learned, it's invest in a good testing environment.

Another trick to improve the speed & quality of development, is to virtualize your production platform to your local workstation. The fake-production server (virtual machine) will mount your code directory directly as it's webroot, and so it can serve your IDE-work instantly.

He uses the VirtualBox software to create the virtual environment (Ubuntu on Ubuntu in this case) and gives the complete steps to setting it all up:

• Download Operating System for Virtual Machine
• Creating/Configuring a new Virtual Machine
• Installing the OS
• Upgrade/Updating to the most recent software versions
• Making it a server
• Testing the Environment

Lehi Sanchez has put together a tutorial showing how to get the combination of a Ubuntu, NGINX, Ruby, and PHP up and working.

I'm going to walk you through the process with the settings that I chose for my server setup. I am not a Linux guru or a web server guru. [...] This post is compiled of steps and configurations that I've found on the internet. I wanted to have a consolidated instruction manual so I'm writing this tutorial to help anyone who's in the same boat as me.

It's a full installation tutorial too - every step from the installation of the operating system down to installing the packages for the web server and two languages (apt-get, of course). There's even parts of the configuration files that you'll need to add/update to get it all integrated.