How to: Run emoncms on NginX and PHP5-FPM

For those of you that don’t know, emoncms is a small cms that will accept inputs via GET requests for things like power meters, temp probes for measuring household power usage, PV panel, windmill etc power production levels.

DEMO **** To achieve this you need to use git to download the newest version of emoncms (the new more modularised version):

$ git clone git://github.com/emoncms/emoncms.git

Next step is to set up a mysql db:

$ mysql -u root -p
mysql> CREATE DATABASE emoncms;
mysql> exit

Next we are going to write and nginx config for emoncms I have hosted mine on https w/ SPDY however for simplicity this config is for http:

server {
        listen 80;
        server_name sub.domain.name;

        location / {
                root /path/to/your/emoncms;
                index index.php;
                rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
        }

        location ~* ^.+.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico|xml)$ {
                expires           30d;
                root /path/to/your/emoncms;
        }

        location ~ .php$ {
                fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(.*)$;
                fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index  index.php;
                fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /path/to/your/emoncms$fastcgi_script_name;
                include fastcgi_params;
                fastcgi_intercept_errors        on;
        }
}

I’d like to highlight this line:

rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;

This is extremely important to make emoncms work, it rewrites the pretty URLs to reference them to the index file. Without this you will get “Invalid Username/Password” when you try to log in or register. cd to your emoncms folder and move the default settings file to make it active, then open it:

$ cd /var/www/emoncms/
$ mv default.settings.php settings.php
$ nano settings.php

Then change your DB settings like so:

/*

Database connection settings

*/

$username = "youruser";
$password = "yourpassword";
$server   = "localhost";
$database = "emoncms";

Now restart NginX:

$ service nginx restart

If all is well you will be able to navigate to your URL, enter a username and password

then click Register, a bit counter-intuitive but there we are.