Wordpress, Nginx and a super cache

Wordpress is one of the more popular blogging and CMS platforms these days. It is written in PHP and therefore means it will run on just about any host with a small startup cost. It is not my favourite platform but it works well and people know it.

Nginx is something that I really DO like so here is how you install Wordpress on Nginx.

Before you can do the “5 minute install” of Wordpress you need to do the “2 minute setup” of Nginx. Here is a simple virtual host configuration for Nginx that has some extra features:

server {
  listen   80;
  server_name .example.com;
  access_log /var/log/nginx/example.com.access.log;

  set $domain $host;
  if ( $domain ~ "^(w{3}\.)?(.*)") {
    set $domain $2;
  }

  location / {
    root /var/www/vhost/$domain/htdocs;
    index  index.php index.html;

    # this serves static files that exist without running other rewrite tests
    if (-f $request_filename) {
      expires 30d;
      break;
    }

    set $supercache_file '';
    set $supercache_uri $request_uri;

    if ($request_method = POST) {
      set $supercache_uri '';
    }

    # Using pretty permalinks, so bypass the cache for any query string
    if ($query_string) {
      set $supercache_uri '';
    }

    if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_" ) {
      set $supercache_uri '';
    }

    # if we haven't bypassed the cache, specify our supercache file
    if ($supercache_uri ~ ^(.+)$) {
      set $supercache_file /var/www/$domain/htdocs/wp-content/cache/supercache/$domain/$1index.html;
    }

    # only rewrite to the supercache file if it actually exists
    if (-f $document_root$supercache_file) {
      rewrite ^(.*)$ $supercache_file break;
    }

    # all other requests go to Wordpress
    if (!-e $request_filename) {
      rewrite . /index.php last;
    }
  }
  
  location ~ \.php$ {
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/$domain/htdocs/$fastcgi_script_name;
    fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:8001;
    fastcgi_index  index.php;
  }

}

There are few things here you should change. Obviously the domain references at the top and then the absolute paths to the Wordpress installation. Also the port that the PHP5 fast CGI services runs on (or the UNIX socket, which you can use spawn-fcgi to create).

The other sections, those referring to ‘supercache’ are where the action happens in Wordpress. It enables Nginx to serve up the cache files that wp-super-cache creates directly. There is no need to have Wordpress serve them up. It also serves up static files directly from your template directory too.