My preferred setup for running Drupal sites uses Nginx, PHP-FPM and MariaDB. After reading a few posts about issues with Drupal 8 in this setup, I decided to quickly test it using Vagrant. I managed to get a development version of Drupal 8 up and running in approximately 30 mins in which I tried various things to get it working. Here are the steps that worked. This is not a complete guide to hosting Drupal 8 on Nginx using PHP-FPM and there's a lot of tweaking needed, so here I just use default configurations wherever possible for simplicity. I plan to share more advanced configurations in a future post, like the configurations I'm using with Apiary.

First make sure you've got Vagrant installed, create a new folder, and initialize a new Vagrant box:

Edit the Vagrantfile to add a port map for port 80, so your Vagrantfile looks like this:

I then vagrant ssh into the box and do an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. I then setup Aptitude sources to enable installation of MariaDB.

And then install all the required packages:

This installs MariaDB, Nginx, PHP-FPM and some required PHP packages, and PHP console table that's required by Drush.

You could start the nginx service now with

sudo service nginx start

and you would see the "Welcome to nginx!" page if you go to http://localhost:4567/ in your browser.

In order to use Drush with Drupal 8 you need to install Drush version 6. This can be done by specifying the version explicitly when installing with pear:

I downloaded Drupal to the /vagrant folder using Drush. I then later found issues with file permissions over the folder shared with the host machine from within Vagrant so I symlinked the sites folder to /home/vagrant and changed the owner to www-data. I also found issues running Drush as the vagrant user, so I use sudo to run it as if it was www-data.

With that command you can then select to download either the Drupal 8 dev version, or the latest alpha (at time of writing alpha2).

I then create a database for Drupal to use by using the Mysql client

And entering these SQL commands:

Then change directory into the Drupal folder and run the Drush site installer as www-data user:

In this test I'm just using the default configurations. So start PHP-FPM and it will be available on 127.0.0.1:9000

I remove the default nginx site:

And then create a new configuration using the values from the Nginx wiki. This is not the production nginx configuration I am using, as I use Puppet modules that I created based on Perusio's nginx configuration, but for this test I just wanted the basics. Copy this code into

/etc/nginx/sites-available/drupal8

and then create a symlink to enable the site:

NB: You need to update the PHP socket information based on the default configuration provided by PHP-FPM otherwise you will get Gateway errors when you try to access the site. By default the nginx configuration above is using a unix socket, so change this to 127.0.0.1:9000 as specified in the default pool configuration for PHP-FPM.

Now start (or restart) nginx to see the site working in the browser: