Nginx on macOS – Remy's Adventures in Cyberspace

I once was quite ready with every major update of macOS ruining my apache setup. So I decided to install nginx. Besides, it is by far the better webserver of the two, so that is a win-win!

First install Homebrew:

$ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

The installer will ask you to run some commands, make sure not to miss them. Then install nginx:

$ brew install nginx

After that start nginx as a service:

$ brew services start nginx

After that I create symlinks so I can just find the documentroot at /var/www and the config at /etc/nginx

In the nginx.conf make sure to run the webserver as you:

user remy staff;

What is a webserver without PHP?

Okay, call me old-school, but I still do a LOT with PHP, so let’s brew up some PHP-foo while we’re at it.

$ brew install php

In /opt/homebrew/etc/php/8.1/php-fpm.d/www.conf specify fpm to run as you and listen to a socket file, rather than a port:

user = remy
group = staff
listen = /opt/homebrew/var/run/php-fpm.sock

And make sure nginx is configured to forward php to the same socket.

upstream phpfpm {
	server unix:/opt/homebrew/var/run/php-fpm.sock;
}

This should do it…