Nginx – how to start/restart fastcgi process

On my server I use nginx+fcgi as well.

My solution isn't foolproof but at least works. I have this script which uses spawn-fcgi and php5-cgi under /etc/init.d/

#!/bin/bash
PHP_SCRIPT='/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi'
RETVAL=0
case "$1" in
    start)
      $PHP_SCRIPT
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    stop)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    restart)
      killall -9 php5-cgi
      $PHP_SCRIPT
      RETVAL=$?
  ;;
    *)
      echo "Usage: php-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
      exit 1
  ;;
esac
exit $RETVAL

and the related nginx conf is this:

server {
        location ~ .php$ {
                        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                        fastcgi_index index.php;
                        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf;
                        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/hyperblasted/$fastcgi_script_name;
        }
        ...
}

and the fastcgi.conf contains the following

fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE nginx;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri;
fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port;
fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;

Hope this helps :)

PS: With this setup I had an issue where the cgi daemon would die every now and then. I worked around this issue by executing this in a cronjob every 5 minutes:

if ps aux | grep 'php5-cgi' | grep -v grep  > /dev/null ; then
        echo "PHP-cgi is runnning !"    
else
        echo "PHP-cgi is down. Starting over..."
        /etc/init.d/php-fcgi start
fi

Nginx is running under some user (on Debian it is usually www-data), you can check it by:

ps aux | grep nginx | grep worker

User will be in the first column.

This user have to have access to /tmp/django.socket for writing and reading. You can solve it by running django under the same user as nginx is running (i.e. www-data on Debian), or you have to add nginx user to the same group, as user, under which are you running django, and socket have to have permission to read and write for group.

The first solution is simplier and (for me) better.