Prepare RdCore on Ubuntu 20.04

Install Nginx

• We assume you have a clean install of Ubuntu 20.04 WITHOUT Apache installed.
• If you have not yet added a sudo user add one now.

# Add the system user
sudo adduser system
# Update the system to the latest
usermod -aG sudo system

• Make sure it is up to date.

# Get the latest package lists
sudo apt-get update
# Update the system to the latest
sudo apt-get upgrade

• Ensure the English language pack is installed

sudo apt-get -y install language-pack-en-base

• Install Nginx

sudo apt-get -y install nginx

• Ensure the web server starts up and is running

sudo systemctl enable nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx

• Navigate to the IP Address of the server where you installed Nginx using a browser to ensure Nginx serves content e.g. http://127.0.0.1

Install and Configure PHP-FPM to allow Nginx interpret .php files

• The default install of Nginx does not support the serving of .php files. We will install PHP-FPM to listen for PHP requests.

• Install the php-fpm package:

sudo apt-get -y install php-fpm
sudo systemctl enable php7.4-fpm
sudo systemctl start php7.4-fpm

Modify Nginx to use PHP-FPM

• Edit the default server file:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

• Add index.php to this line:

#add index.php
index index.php index.html index.htm;

• Activate PHP processing by uncommenting the section below. (Note that we use the UNIX socket for better performance)

# pass PHP scripts to FastCGI server
#
location ~ \.php$ {
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    #
    #       # With php-fpm (or other unix sockets):
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.4-fpm.sock;
    #       # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets):
    #       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
}

• Deny access to .htaccess files

 # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
 # concurs with nginx's one
 #
 location ~ /\.ht {
     deny all;
 }

• Reload the Nginx web server's configuration

sudo systemctl reload nginx

• Create an info.php file and confirm that it interprets PHP properly

sudo vi /usr/share/nginx/html/info.php

• Contents:

 <?php phpinfo(); ?>

• Navigate to http://127.0.0.1/info.php and see if the page displays the PHP info.

Install MariaDB

Why MariaDB?

• We discovered that the version of MySQL that comes bundled by default with Ubuntu 20.04 are breaking things on RdCore.
• For this reason we install MariaDB as an alternative.
• MariaDB is an open-source relational database management system, commonly used as an alternative for MySQL as the database portion of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack
• It is intended to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL.
• Be sure to supply a root password for the MariaDB database when asked for it if you are security conscious else simply hit the ESC key.

sudo apt-get -y install mariadb-server php-mysql
sudo systemctl enable mariadb
sudo systemctl restart mariadb
sudo systemctl status mariadb

Disable strict mode

• With Ubuntu 20.04, the bundled release of MariaDB is at version 10.3 which introduced a few Strict modes which have some problems with RdCore database implementation
• We will disable Strict SQL Mode in MariaDB by creating a new file /etc/mysql/conf.d/disable_strict_mode.cnf

sudo vi /etc/mysql/conf.d/disable_strict_mode.cnf

• Enter these two lines:

[mysqld]
sql_mode=IGNORE_SPACE,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

• Save the file and restart the MariaDB Server

sudo systemctl restart mariadb

Nginx Performance Tuning - Modify expiry date for certain files

• Edit the /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file:

sudo vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

• Add the following inside the server section:

location ~ ^/cake4/.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|js|css)$ {
    rewrite ^/cake4/rd_cake/webroot/(.*)$ /cake4/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    rewrite ^/cake4/rd_cake/(.*)$ /cake4/rd_cake/webroot/$1 break;
    access_log off;
    expires max;
    add_header Cache-Control public;
}

• Reload Nginx:

sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Next Steps

• Installing RdCore