Running Simple Groupware On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

This tutorial shows how you can install and run Simple Groupware on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). Simple Groupware is an open source enterprise groupware that offers email, calendaring, contacts, tasks, document management, project management, synchronization with Outlook and cell phones, full-text search, extensions and many more. nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.
I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I want to install Simple Groupware in a vhost called www.example.com/example.com here with the document root /var/www/www.example.com/web.
You should have a working LEMP installation, as shown in these tutorials:

• Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze
• Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10

A note for Ubuntu users:
Because we must run all the steps from this tutorial with root privileges, we can either prepend all commands in this tutorial with the string sudo, or we become root right now by typing

sudo su

2 Configuring PHP

APC is a free and open PHP opcode cacher for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. It's similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and XCache. It is strongly recommended to have one of these installed to speed up your PHP page.
APC can be installed as follows:

apt-get install php-apc

We also need to install the following prerequisites for Simple Groupware to work:

apt-get install catdoc ppthtml imagemagick unzip poppler-utils mp3info exiv2 graphviz php5-gd

Now we must configure PHP to allow big uploads - the default value is 2MB which is not much. I want to raise this limit to 512MB. Open your php.ini - if you use PHP-FPM, it is /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini...

vi /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini

... and if you use spawn-fcgi, it is /etc/php5/cli/php.ini:

vi /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

[...] memory_limit = 512M [...] post_max_size = 512M [...] upload_max_filesize = 512M [...]

If you use PHP-FPM as your FastCGI daemon (like in Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10), restart it as follows:

/etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart

If you use lighttpd's spawn-fcgi program as your FastCGI daemon (like in Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Debian Squeeze), we must kill the current spawn-fcgi process (running on port 9000) and create a new one. Run

netstat -tap

to find out the PID of the current spawn-fcgi process:

root@server1:~# netstat -tap
Active Internet connections (servers and established)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 *:sunrpc                *:*                     LISTEN      734/portmap
tcp        0      0 *:www                   *:*                     LISTEN      2987/nginx
tcp        0      0 *:ssh                   *:*                     LISTEN      1531/sshd
tcp        0      0 *:57174                 *:*                     LISTEN      748/rpc.statd
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:smtp *:*                     LISTEN      1507/exim4
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdom:9000 *:*                     LISTEN      1542/php5-cgi
tcp        0      0 localhost.localdo:mysql *:*                     LISTEN      1168/mysqld
tcp        0     52 server1.example.com:ssh 192.168.0.198:2462      ESTABLISHED 1557/0
tcp6       0      0 [::]:www                [::]:*                  LISTEN      2987/nginx
tcp6       0      0 [::]:ssh                [::]:*                  LISTEN      1531/sshd
tcp6       0      0 ip6-localhost:smtp      [::]:*                  LISTEN      1507/exim4
root@server1:~#

In the above output, the PID is 1542, so we can kill the current process as follows:

kill -9 1542

Afterwards we create a new spawn-fcgi process:

/usr/bin/spawn-fcgi -a 127.0.0.1 -p 9000 -u www-data -g www-data -f /usr/bin/php5-cgi -P /var/run/fastcgi-php.pid

3 Installing Simple Groupware

The document root of my www.example.com web site is /var/www/www.example.com/web - if it doesn't exist, create it as follows:

mkdir -p /var/www/www.example.com/web

Next we download the Simple Groupware installer script from http://www.simple-groupware.de/cms/Download and place it in our document root:

cd /var/www/www.example.com/web
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/simplgroup/simplegroupware%20installer/0.8/sgs_installer.php.gz
gunzip sgs_installer.php.gz

It is recommended to make the document root and the Simple Groupware installer in it writable by the nginx daemon which is running as user www-data and group www-data:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/www.example.com/web

If you haven't already created a MySQL database for Simple Groupware (including a MySQL Simple Groupware user), you can do that as follows (I name the database sgware in this example, and the user is called sgware_admin, and his password is sgware_admin_password):

mysqladmin -u root -p create sgware

mysql -u root -p

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sgware.* TO 'sgware_admin'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'sgware_admin_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sgware.* TO 'sgware_admin'@'localhost.localdomain' IDENTIFIED BY 'sgware_admin_password';

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

quit;

Next we create an nginx vhost configuration for our www.example.com vhost in the /etc/nginx/sites-available/ directory as follows:

vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.example.com.vhost

server { listen 80; server_name www.example.com example.com; root /var/www/www.example.com/web; if ($http_host != "www.example.com") { rewrite ^ http://www.example.com$request_uri permanent; } location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; expires max; } location = /robots.txt { allow all; log_not_found off; access_log off; } # Deny all attempts to access hidden files such as .htaccess, .htpasswd, .DS_Store (Mac). location ~ /\. { deny all; access_log off; log_not_found off; } client_max_body_size 1000M; dav_methods PUT DELETE MKCOL COPY MOVE; create_full_put_path on; dav_access user:rw group:rw all:r; # WebDAV server location ~ ^/sgdav { rewrite . /bin/webdav.php; } # CMS real URLs location ~ ^/cms/ { rewrite ^/cms/ext/(.*)$ /bin/ext/cms/$1 last; rewrite ^/cms/thumbs/(.*)$ /bin/preview.php?filename=$1 last; rewrite ^/cms/(.*?)/file/(.*)$ /bin/cms.php?page=$1&file=$2 last; rewrite ^/cms/(.*)$ /bin/cms.php?page=$1 last; } # Root location = / { if ($request_method = "OPTIONS") { rewrite . /bin/webdav.php last; } try_files /bin/index.php /src/index.php /sgs_installer.php =404; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # use spawn-fcgi (!!) } # Root PHP /*.php location ~ ^/([^/]+\.php)$ { try_files /bin/$1 /src/$1 $uri =404; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # use spawn-fcgi (!!) } # sgs src/*.php bin/*.php location ~ ^/(src|bin)/([^/]+\.php|ext/.+\.php)$ { include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # use spawn-fcgi (!!) } # Redirect static files location ~ ^/(src/|bin/)?(ext/.*|docs/.*)$ { try_files /custom/$2 /ext/$2 /bin/$2 /src/$2 $uri =404; } # Drop all other stuff location / { if (!-f $request_filename) { return 404; } #return 403; } }

To enable the vhost, we create a symlink to it from the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ directory:

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/www.example.com.vhost www.example.com.vhost

Reload nginx for the changes to take effect:

/etc/init.d/nginx reload

Now we can launch the web-based Simple Groupware installer by going to http://www.example.com/sgs_installer.php - select the version you want to install (e.g. 0.742) and click on the INSTALL link in front of it:

The Simple Groupware package is now being downloaded and installed. Click on CONTINUE:

Select the language that you want to use for Simple Groupware:

The selected language is now being installed. Click on Continue:

Next fill in the database details (user: sgware_admin; password: sgware_admin_password; database: sgware), select MySQL as the database backend in the Database drop-down menu, specify an admin username and password and select a folder structure to install (if you are new to Simple Groupware, you can install demo folders to play with). Then scroll down to the bottom of the page...

... and accept the license. Click on Install afterwards:

The installation is now being completed:

Afterwards you are taken to the Simple Groupware web interface - if you see this, your installation was successful, and you can now start to use Simple Groupware.

The administration settings can be found under Main menu > Administration (if you don't see this menu item, please log out and back in as the administrator). Here you can install extensions (click on the Simple Groupware Extensions link), for example, or change Simple Groupware settings (click on the Change Setup settings link):

If you want to use WebDAV with Simple Groupware, the WebDAV URL is http://www.example.com/sgdav. Please note that by default, anonymous logins are enabled. To make your users authenticate with their username and password, go to Change Setup settings and uncheck the box Enable anonymous access:

Please note that currently not all WebDAV operations are supported. You can find details about the current state of the Simple Groupware WebDAV implementation on http://www.simple-groupware.de/cms/WebDAV.
One note for WebDAV users under Windows: on Windows XP SP3 I had the following problem: when I used the WebDAV URL http://www.example.com/sgdav, I couldn't log into WebDAV although my username and password were correct. By using http://www.example.com:80/sgdav instead I could log in, but got an infinite folder recursion problem. I could solve both problems by using http://www.example.com/sgdav/# - see http://www.thrrrust.com/~pclark/blog/2005/03/fun-with-windows-xp-and-webdav.html (including the second comment).

4 Links

• Simple Groupware: http://www.simple-groupware.de/
• nginx: http://nginx.org/
• nginx Wiki: http://wiki.nginx.org/
• Debian: http://www.debian.org/
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/