Nginx – how to install mono xsp4 and fastcgi-mono-server4

I'm starting also a new adventure with very similar setup and we share similar concerns about it. Let's talk more ;)

I'll try to answer avoiding new questions, but not guaranteed:

1. I think, need to try, it can be done similar on when you update on a regular IIS deployment scenario. Understanding ASP.NET Dynamic Compilation can help to get more into this. Updates side-effects can always be minimized and all depends on your needs.
2. It's possible to have several fastcgi-mono-server instances running, still investigating some details dough, listening on different internal ports. I've managed to do this but require more testing.

Other 2 questions...

I also haven't find to many news and documentation on the subject but I'm using fastcgi-mono-server, fastcgi-mono-server2 and fastcgi-mono-server4 without any problems and, as you, I have mono 2.10.5. Consider yourself as an adventurer on asp.net+mono world. I'll try to blog more about my findings to contribute with a more broader discussion.

AFAIK fastcgi-mono-server does not need to run as privileged user, that is root access should not be needed. I'me also investigating more about on security level because at deployment level/running my apps right now I feel I'v reached a stable solution.

Hope this can bring some light to your doubt's... and mine.

Two additional FastCGI parameters are required.

fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT "80";
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;

Credit goes to KnyghtMare from the #mono IRC channel for his test script. By elimination, the required parameters for the nginx conf were found. Usage note: you might have to change the IP and port number on the last line, and HTTP_HOST.

SERVER_SOFTWARE="lighttpd/1.4.26" \
SERVER_NAME="127.0.0.1" \
GATEWAY_INTERFACE="CGI/1.1" \
SERVER_PORT="80" \
SERVER_ADDR="127.0.0.1" \
REMOTE_PORT="28886" \
REMOTE_ADDR="127.0.0.1" \
SCRIPT_NAME="/" \
PATH_INFO="" \
SCRIPT_FILENAME="/var/www/" \
DOCUMENT_ROOT="/var/www/" \
REQUEST_URI="/" \
QUERY_STRING="" \
REQUEST_METHOD="GET" \
REDIRECT_STATUS="200" \
SERVER_PROTOCOL="HTTP/1.1" \
HTTP_HOST="arch" \
HTTP_CONNECTION="keep-alive" \
HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL="max-age=0" \
HTTP_USER_AGENT="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.83 Safari/535.11" \
HTTP_ACCEPT="text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8" \
HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING="gzip,deflate" \
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE="en-US,en;q=0.8" \
HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET="ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3" \
cgi-fcgi -bind -connect 127.0.0.1:9000

After some more modifications to get resource files working, this is the current configuration:

server
{
        listen 80;
        server_name arch;

        access_log /var/www/test/log/access.log;
        error_log /var/www/test/log/error.log debug;

        root /var/www/test/public;

        location /
        {
                try_files $uri @proxy;
        }

        location @proxy
        {
                fastcgi_index /Home;
                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_param PATH_INFO "";
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
                fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
        }
}