This post is mainly a reminder to my future self in case I need to do something like this again.

Using bleeding edge technologies on Windows has always been a painful process. Mainly because not many LAMP developers use windows (its just not in the acronym), which leads to poor support of the OS and lack of learning material.

After playing with NodeJS and watching Ryan’s presentation, I realized all the drawbacks of Apache - my default web server for many years - and decided to give ngninx a shot.

• Download and install a copy of the most recent php version for windows (PHP 5.3.3). Please note, that since we’re not gonna be using Apache, you can download the non tread safe version compiled with VC9.
• The second step is to get nginx executable in the download section of nginx website. On Windows its as simple as unzipping the file into c:\nginx directory.
• After that is done, we need to configure it to work with PHP. To do that let’s open c:\nginx\conf\nginx.conf and create the following server config:

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server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  your_app.lcl;

    #charset koi8-r;

    access_log  logs/your_app.lcl.access.log  main;

    location / {
        root   c:\www\path\to\your\website;
        index  index.php;
    }

    #error_page  404              /404.html;

    # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
    #
    error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
    location = /50x.html {
        root    c:\www\path\to\your\website;
    }

    # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
    #
    location ~ \.php(/.*)?$ {
        root           c:\www\path\to\your\website;
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index  index.php;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  c:\www\path\to\your\website\web$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;
    #}
}

The above config tells nginx that application on http://your_app.lcl/ is located at c:\www\path\to\your\website on your filesystem. Furthermore, it tells nginx that all *.php files need to be served through a fast_cgi server on port 9000. * Now that we configured nginx to use fast_cgi for *.php files, we need to start a fast cgi server daemon. From your windows console run C:\php\php-cgi.exe -b 127.0.0.1:9000, where C:\php is the php installation path. * You can access your application at http://your_app.lcl/ after starting the nginx process in c:\nginx\nginx.exe

Happy Coding!