Handy External Spawning FastCGI PHP Processes in FreeBSD

The script attached should be very handy for FreeBSD users. This is rc.d script to spawn FastCGI PHP processes. It is based on spawn-php.sh from doc/ directory in the lighttpd sources.

Install

Just copy fastcgi-php.sh to /usr/local/etc/rc.d/. Then

# cd /usr/local/etc/rc.d/
# chown root:wheel fastcgi-php.sh
# chmod 544 fastcgi-php.sh
# mkdir /var/run/fcgiphp
# chown www:www /var/run/fcgiphp

You should replace www:www in the last line with your user:group which FastCGI will run under (see fcgiphp_user and fcgiphp_group in configuration below).

Configure

Here are configuration parameters with their default values, which you can change in /etc/rc.conf:

fcgiphp_enable="NO"                      # enable FastCGI+PHP
fcgiphp_bin_path="/usr/local/bin/php"    # absolute path to the PHP binary
fcgiphp_user="www"                       # switch to user
fcgiphp_group="www"                      # switch to group
fcgiphp_children="10"                    # number of PHP childs to spawn
fcgiphp_port="8002"                      # bind to tcp-port on localhost
fcgiphp_socket="/tmp/php-fastcgi.sock"   # bind to unix domain socket
fcgiphp_env="SHELL PATH USER"            # allowed environment variables separated by spaces
fcgiphp_max_requests="500"               # number of request server by a single php-process until is will be restarted
fcgiphp_addr="localhost"                 # adresses where PHP should access server connections from

To make script workable you must adjust only one thing:

fcgiphp_enable="YES"

With current versions of the php4 and php5 ports from FreeBSD, you must enable "Build CGI version" when building the PHP port. The CGI version of the PHP binary is now called "php-cgi". In this case, you need to make the following change in /etc/rc.conf:

fcgiphp_bin_path="/usr/local/bin/php-cgi"

Note, that socket has more priority than port. If you want to bind to TCP-port you must unset socket parameter:

fcgiphp_socket=""
fcgiphp_port="8002"

Control

Now you can:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/fastcgi-php.sh start
Starting fcgiphp.
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/fastcgi-php.sh stop
Stopping fcgiphp.
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/fastcgi-php.sh restart
Stopping fcgiphp.
Starting fcgiphp.

Compatibility

The script was tested only under FreeBSD 6.0, but it should run under any modern FreeBSD system.