Nginx and WordPress µ 2.6

After googling like a madman and trying to learn russian the hard way I thought I should write down how I got nginx and Wordpres µ 2.6 working with multiple sites on a FreeBSD-server.

Reading the forums I found this thread which in parts made the whole thing work. First I installed nginx, PHP5, Mysql and FastCGI. The next step is to download wpmu’s latest build and head over to wpmudev.org after the Multi-Site Manager Plugin.

The hard thing is configuring the nginx-server and writing the rewriterules. Thanks to the posts in the forum I found this setup to work.

nginx.conf

server
{listen       80;
servername               wpmusite.com
                              *.wpmusite.com
                    someotherdomain.com
                               yetanother.com;
charset utf-8;
location ~* ^.+\.(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz
                        |gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|
                        tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$
   {root /usr/local/www/wpmu;
    rewrite ^/.*(/wp-.*/.*\.(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico
                                   |css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc
                                   |xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid
                                   |midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js))$ $1 last;
     rewrite ^.*/files/(.*(html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip
                               |tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt
                                |txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js))$
                             /wp-content/blogs.php?file=$1 last;
expires 10d;
break;}
location / {
root   /usr/local/www/wpmu;
index  index.php;
if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^.+/?(/wp-.*) $1 last;
rewrite ^.+/?(/.*\.php)$ $1 last;
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;}}
location ~ .php$ {
fastcgi_pass  localhost:10004;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/local/www/wpmu$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;}

To add another site to my wpmu-installation I just add the domain after servername, point the DNS to the right ip-adress and add the site with the Multi-Site Manager-plugin.

I have tested to add new sites, blogs and upload files. It all seem to work ok but I’m no way certain it’ll work for other *nix distros or with advanced plugins. There’s probably a million ways this setup could be improved and/or broken! I’m espacially worried about how nginx handles the rewrites as I don’t fully understand the syntaxes yet.

Please point me towards any problems with this setup and I’d be glad to update the howto.

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