One of the reasons I host using HTMLy is that it is quite simple. No DB's to manage, just PHP and some .MD files.
I have been upgrading many of my servers that run on 18.04 and sometimes PHP doesnt make this as easy as it should be. My old instance ran on Apache. Nothing against Apache, I am just increasingly more familiar with NGINX. So a do-release-upgrade failed, and rather than take the time to properly fix the post-upgrade issues, I just rolled a new VPS (and saved some cash) and moved my files.
Process was fairly simple though.
- Build new server, install and configure SSH, firewall, user etc.
- Install php-fpm and nginx
- Configure nginx
- Copy the root webserver files from the old source to the new.
- setup my rsync accounts and re-configure my backups
This is all pretty boilerplate stuff. I use UFW for the firewall and simply limit SSH connections to my known IP's I tend to work from. I configure SSH with normal settings, like limiting access to groups, only using key based auth etc.
PHP-FPM needs nothing special, though NGINX did need some tweaking. The recommended config, at least for Debian/Ubuntu does work out of the box. I am not using PHP-cgi or TCP sockets but rather the default Unix sockets.
Here is the sample config that does work.
server {
listen 80 ;
listen [::]:80;
server_name wallyswiki.com www.wallyswiki.com;
root /var/www/html;
# Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log error;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}
# Commented out as it broke the admin pages
#location ~ /config/ {
# deny all;
#}
# pass PHP scripts to FastCGI server
#
location ~ .php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
#
# # With php-fpm (or other unix sockets):
fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.1-fpm.sock;
# # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets):
# fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
# fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME
$document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
# deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
# concurs with nginx's one
#
location ~ /.ht {
deny all;
}
}
After this its simply setting up certbot/Lets Encrypt.
Finally, since there is no DB or anything to work off of. You can simply copy over your files and make sure the permissions (namely the www-data:www-data users and groups) are set properly.
For me, I simply created a tar file, used SCP to copy the file over and extracted it. Though you could easily do this with rsync as well, and this would be especially useful if you are trying to keep multiple locations in sync.
UPDATE
I noticed RSS wasnt working. Nginx was throwing the following in error.log
2023/05/12 00:33:36 [error] 16320#16320: *1090 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Class "SimpleXMLElement" not found in /var/www/html/system/vendor/suin/php-rss-writer/src/Suin/RSSWriter/SimpleXMLElement.php:9
Therefore I simply installed php8.1-xml and issue is fixed.
sudo apt install php8.1-xml
sudo service php8.1-fpm restart
sudo service nginx restart
