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Compiling PHP 5.3.0 with FPM

PHP-FPM (PHP FastCGI Process Management) is a patch for PHP to improve PHP’s FastCGI capabilities and administration. Prior to FPM, I was using the spawn-fcgi library from Lighttpd to manage PHP processes for Nginx. Although this works as it should, I was curious to try FPM given some of the configuration options. Some of the key features over using FastCGI are:

1. Process Management. Using PHP-FPM provides the ability to gracefully stop and start PHP workers without losing any queries. You also have a log and pid file as well.

2. Restrict IP addresses from which requests can come from.

3. Start the workers with different uid/gid/chroot/environment and different php.ini option. You do not need a safe mode.

4. Just like MySQL, PHP-FPM provides the ability to track the slow execution of scripts and record them in a log file along with the backtrace.

The most recent patch provided is for PHP 5.3.0. The following will outline how to install and patch PHP 5.3.0 with FPM:

$ cd /usr/local/src/
$ wget http://us.php.net/get/php-5.3.0.tar.bz2/from/this/mirror
$ tar -jxvpf php-5.3.0.tar.bz2
$ wget http://php-fpm.org/downloads/php-5.3.0-fpm-0.5.12.diff.gz
$ gzip -cd php-5.3.0-fpm-0.5.12.diff.gz | patch -d php-5.3.0  -p1
$ cd php-5.3.0

Now, this part is really up to you. I’ve set this up on a development VM with VirtualBox so if you want to compile PHP with different extensions, check php.net for availability:

$ ./configure --enable-fastcgi --enable-fpm --with-mcrypt --with-zlib --enable-mbstring --with-openssl --with-mysql --with-mysql-sock --with-curl --with-gd --enable-gd-native-ttf --without-sqlite --disable-pdo --disable-reflection

Now, make and install:

$ make all install
$ strip /usr/local/bin/php-cgi

Edit the php-fpm.conf so that PHP runs as www-data instead of nobody. You’ll need to uncomment lines 63 and 66 as well:

$ vim /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.conf
:63
www-data
:66
www-data

To create the init script, we’ll symlink the one provided and update the rc.d:

$ cd /etc/init.d/
$ ln -s /usr/local/sbin/php-fpm php-fpm
$ /usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f php-fpm defaults

Start it up:

$ /etc/init.d/php-fpm start