I’ve been playing with my VPS that I bought from WeLoveServers.net and I previously wrote about how to set up your VPS from scratch. Here I’ll show just brief commands for installing a MEN NPP stack (MongoDB, Express, Node.js, Nginx, PostgreSQL, PHP) on my CentOS machine.

Nginx

• high performance web server that is much more flexible and lightweight than Apache
• SELinux – if you run into issues change the SELinux mode to permissive or disabled
• sudo rpm -Uvh http://nginx.org/packages/centos/7/noarch/RPMS/nginx-release-centos-7-0.el7.ngx.noarch.rpm
• sudo yum install nginx
• sudo systemctl start nginx.service or sudo service nginx start
• sudo systemctl enable nginx.service (no alternative with sudo service)
• default server root directory /usr/share/nginx/html defined /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
• server blocks (known as Virtual Hosts in Apache) are created in /etc/nginx/conf.d. Files that end with .conf in that directory will be loaded when Nginx is started
• main Nginx configuration file is located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

• sudo vi /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf looks like:

  server {
      listen       80;
      server_name  localhost;
  
      location / {
          root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
          index  index.html index.htm;
      }
      error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
      location = /50x.html {
          root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
      }
  }

  change to:

  server {
      listen       80;
      server_name  server_domain_name_or_IP;
  
      root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
      index index.php index.html index.htm;
  
      location / {
          try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
      }
      error_page 404 /404.html;
      error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
      location = /50x.html {
          root /usr/share/nginx/html;
      }
  
      location ~ \.php$ {
          try_files $uri =404;
          fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock;
          fastcgi_index index.php;
          fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
          include fastcgi_params;
      }

• sudo systemctl restart nginx
• sudo nginx -t
  nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
  nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Node.js

• just a side note for Mac: brew install node
• sudo yum install epel-release
• sudo yum install node
• sudo yum install npm

Express

• npm install express

PHP

• sudo yum install php php-mysql php-fpm
• sudo vi /etc/php.ini – in order to secure it do cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
• sudo vi /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf set line to listen = /var/run/php-fpm/php-fpm.sock
• sudo systemctl start php-fpm
• sudo systemctl enable php-fpm.service to start from boot

PostgreSQL

• exclude the CentOS version of postgres in order to get the most recent version from the project’s website
• sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
  At the bottom of the [base] and [updates] sections, add a line that excludes the postgres packages: exclude=postgresql*
• Find the link for your version of the OS here
• curl -O http://yum.postgresql.org/9.4/redhat/rhel-7-x86_64/pgdg-centos94-9.4-1.noarch.rpm
• rpm -ivh pgdg*
• yum list postgres*
• install the -server package: sudo postgresql94-server.x86_64
• sudo /usr/pgsql-9.4/bin/postgresql94-setup initdb
  
• chkconfig postgresql-9.3 on
• service postgresql-9.3 start
• postgres creates a user and a database called postgres
• sudo su – postgres
• psql
• \?: Get a full list of psql commands, including those not listed here
• \h: Get help on SQL commands. You can follow this with a specific command to get help with the syntax
• \q: Quit the psql program and exit to the Linux prompt
• \d: List available tables, views, and sequences in current database
• \du: List available roles
• \dp: List access privileges
• \dt: List tables
• \l: List databases
• \c: Connect to a different database. Follow this by the database name
• \password: Change the password for the username that follows
• \conninfo: Get information about the current database and connection

  CREATE TABLE new_table_name (
      table_column_title TYPE_OF_DATA column_constraints,
      next_column_title TYPE_OF_DATA column_constraints,
      table_constraint
      table_constraint
  ) INHERITS existing_table_to_inherit_from;

   

MongoDB

• Instructions from here
• sudo vim /etc/yum.repos.d/mongodb.repo:

  [mongodb]
  name=MongoDB Repository
  baseurl=http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/redhat/os/x86_64/
  gpgcheck=0
  enabled=1

• sudo yum install -y mongodb-org
• to prevent unintended upgrades, add to /etc/yum.conf file:
  exclude=mongodb-org,mongodb-org-server,mongodb-org-shell,mongodb-org-mongos,mongodb-org-tools
• sudo service mongod start
• sudo chkconfig mongod on