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Vanilla Forums Installation on Debian

Katmandu, Nepal

Prerequisites​

It is strongly recommended to set up the following environment on your server:

  • PHP 7.3 or higher.
  • MySQL 5.7 or higher (or MariaDB equivalent).
  • SSL encryption (check out LetsEncrypt).

NGINX​

The most important consideration to getting Vanilla running on nginx is to make sure the rewrite rules are correct. Below is one suggested configuration which locks down the server to only respond to requests via index.php, which we strongly recommend if Vanilla is the only application running.

Make sure that you set the fastcgi_param named X_REWRITE to 1.

Make sure that fastcgi_pass is set to the name of your actual upstream (in our example below, it’s named php-fpm), or call your PHP install directly by socket, for example: unix:/run/php/php7.3-fpm.sock.

Make sure that you define PATH_INFO in your fastcgi_param file. You may find this example set of FastCGI params helpful.

When configuring FastCGI, using $realpath_root instead of $document_root may be necessary in some setups (e.g. when using symlinks).

We define SCRIPT_NAME and SCRIPT_FILENAME explicitly because some configurations may redundantly re-add them during the rewrite, resulting in a name of /index.php/index.php. The end result of this is all your Javascript and CSS assets paths in the page start with /index.php, thus breaking them. Feel free to omit those two lines if you’re confident your configuration is immune.

Sample Configurations​

This would go within the appropriate server { } block. It assumes you’ve already assigned a root and index, among other things:

    # Block some folders as an extra hardening measure.
    location ~* /\.git { deny all; return 403; }
    location /build/ { deny all; return 403; }
    location /cache/ { deny all; return 403; }
    location /cgi-bin/ { deny all; return 403; }
    location /uploads/import/ { deny all; return 403; }
    location /conf/ { deny all; return 403; }
    location /tests/ { deny all; return 403; }
    location /vendor/ { deny all; return 403; }

    # This handles all the main requests thru index.php.
    location ~* ^/index\.php(/|$) {
        # send to fastcgi
        include fastcgi.conf;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME /index.php;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $realpath_root/index.php;
        fastcgi_param X_REWRITE 1;
        fastcgi_pass php-fpm; # where 'php-fpm' is the upstream, probably defined in nginx.conf
    }

    # If this is some other PHP script, disallow it by redirecting to /index.php
    location ~* \.php(/|$) {
        rewrite ^ /index.php$uri last;
    }

    # Default path handling
    location / {
        try_files $uri @vanilla;
    }

    location @vanilla {
        rewrite ^ /index.php$uri last;
    }