nginx and php-fpm socket owner

Question

After an update of my system I ran into a bad gateway error of my PHP apps running on Nginx.

1 connect() to unix:/var/run/php-fcgi-vhostname-php-fcgi-

Answer 1

Config files FPM will read

/etc/php-fpm.conf is the config file FPM will read (on CentOS). If you want FPM to read other config files as well, you need to tell it that.

You can do this by placing the line include=/etc/php-fpm.d/*.conf at the bottom of /etc/php-fpm.conf. It will then read everything in the directory /etc/php-fpm.d (that ends with .conf).

Then place the global directives and the include line in /etc/php-fpm.conf. This could look something like this:

[global]

pid = /var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.pid
error_log = /var/log/php5-fpm.log

include=/etc/php-fpm.d/*.conf

And have a separate file in /etc/php-fpm.d for each pool.

Example /etc/php-fpm.d/global.conf:

[global-pool]

user = www-data
group = www-data

listen = /var/run/php-fcgi.sock

listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
listen.mode = 0660

pm = dynamic
pm.start_servers = 1
pm.max_children = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 5

Example /etc/php-fpm.d/vhostname-0.conf:

[vhostname-php-fcgi-0]

user = www-data
group = www-data

listen = /var/run/php-fcgi-vhostname-php-fcgi-0.sock

listen.owner = www-data
listen.group = www-data
listen.mode = 0660

pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 5
pm.start_servers = 1
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 5

Directives to pay attention to

• Every pool should use a different socket. If you have multiple pools using the same socket you'll get issues.

• The directives user and group control the user/group which the FPM process for that pool will run as. These do not specify the user/group of the socket.

• The directives listen.owner and listen.group control the user/group the socket uses for that pool.

• The pool directives (like listen.*) will only work for pools. So you can't use them in the global section, you have to specify them for each pool.

Socket permissions

The permissions 0660 are perfectly fine when listen.owner and listen.group are the same as the webserver. You could even use 0600, but one might argue that any user that can operate under the same group as the webserver can also use the socket, so I would use 0660.