A few months ago I converted my web cluster from Apache to Nginx. Initially I was only concerned with my WordPress sites as they get, by far the most traffic. Their conversion went well, with only very minor issues.

Since I was happy with the results, I moved to quickly to my MediaWiki site. It’s conversion went very well and actually end up allowing the site to accept requests with and without index.php in them.

During this time, my other random sites, using odd or old software, was simply proxied back to the still running Apache install on my server. Using nginx’s proxy configuration, i was able to just change the port Apache listen on and left the old configurations as they were.  This allowed me to stay up, but didn’t give me any of the benefits of nginx.  Images from the my Gallery3 gallery were still being served from Apache, threw Nginx.

After getting everything working, I decided to start on Gallery3, since Gallery3 uses .htaccess files to secure images, I wasn’t sure how I would be able to go about this.  After some investigating I found that Gallery3 only uses the .htaccess files to block downloading of the actual images them self’s, the php pages are still secured threw normal permissions.

Configuring Nginx

Setting up Gallery3 under Nginx is pretty straightforward, when ignoring the .htaccess file talked about above.  As with all my Nginx setup’s, im using php-fpm via a UNIX sock.  Switching to a TCP connection (such as 127.0.0.0:8000), can be substituted with only minor tweaks.

To start out, create a new file in your nginx configuration directory, named gallery3.conf.  This file will be generic enough that you will be able to use it for any Gallery3 install on the server. Your site specific information will live in your main nginx.conf file.

Create a new file named gallery3.conf, and copy the below into it:

location ~* .(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico|ttf)$ {
    expires 180d;
#    if_modified_since off;
#    add_header Last-Modified "";
}

if (!-e $request_filename) {
    rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?kohana_uri=$1 last;
}

location /var/ {
    try_files $uri /index.php?kohana_uri=$2;
}

location = /downloadalbum/zip/album/1 {
    return 404;
}

location  ~* .php$ {
    include fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(.*)$;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO        $fastcgi_path_info;
    fastcgi_pass php;

    index index.php;

    if (-f $request_filename) {
        rewrite ^/var/albums/(.*)$ /file_proxy/$1 last;
        expires max;
        break;
    }

    if (!-e $request_filename) {
        rewrite ^/(.+)$ /index.php?kohana_uri=$1 last;
    }
}

Now you need to setup your new site in Nginx’s main config file.  Below is the most basic setup, it assumes you have a running Nginx server and are only adding this site to it.  Note the name of the server and the root location of the files needs to be updated.

Added to nginx.conf:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name gallery.example.com;
    root /var/www/gallery.example.com;
    include gallery3.conf;
}

This next part really sucks and I wish there was a way around it, in your Gallery3 installation, go into applications/config/config.php and modify the “index_page” setting as shown below.

application/config/config.php:

$config["index_page"] = "";

What sucks about this is you will need to do it after EVERY UPDATE. If after you update Gallery3 and you loose your style sheet and java scripts, this is why.

The config file should not live in a location that get’s updated automatically with new versions of software.