Installing NGINX and PHP-FPM on Debian 10

PHP-FPM is an alternative implementation of PHP FastCGI with a few additional features commonly used for high-load sites.

Updating the system:

sudo apt update

Install NGINX

sudo apt install nginx

If you do not have a UFW firewall installed, we will install it

sudo apt install ufw

Open the necessary ports and reboot the firewall

sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'
sudo ufw reload

Let's check the status

sudo ufw status
Status: active
To                         Action      From
--                         ------      ----
OpenSSH                    ALLOW       Anywhere
Nginx HTTP                 ALLOW       Anywhere
OpenSSH (v6)               ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)
Nginx HTTP (v6)            ALLOW       Anywhere (v6)

Install PHP-FPM

Because Nginx does not contain native PHP processing, we need to install fpm, which means "fastCGI process manager". We will tell Nginx to pass PHP requests to this software

apt install php-fpm

Configure NGINX

Let's create directories for the site

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/%site_name%/{public_html,logs}

Now let's create a configuration file for the virtual host in NGINX. Usually, I use MC

sudo mcedit /etc/nginx/sites-available/%site_name%.conf
server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;

    root $root_path;
    set $root_path /var/www/%site_name%/htdocs;
    set $php_sock unix:/var/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock;
    index index.php index.html index.htm;

    server_name %site_name%;

    access_log /var/www/%site_name%/logs/access.log;
    error_log /var/www/%site_name%/logs/error.log;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass $php_sock;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

We make a simlink that would connect a virtual host

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/%site_name%.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Check the NGINX configuration to make sure there are no errors

nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Restart NGINX and PHP-FPM

systemctl restart nginx php7.3-fpm

That's all. NGINX and PHP-FPM are configured and ready to use.