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Install Nginx

Prep

• These instructions are for Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian version 12 (bookworm).
• You can issue the command cat /etc/issue.net to confirm the version. It should say Debian GNU/Linux 12 .
• 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

• Install Nginx

sudo apt-get -y install nginx

• Ensure the web server starts up and is running

sudo systemctl stop nginx.service
sudo systemctl start nginx.service

• 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

Configure Nginx to interpret .php files

• The default install of Nginx does not support the serving of .php files.
• We will install a program (actually a service) called php-fpm.
• This service will listen for requests to interpret.
• Install the php-fpm service by installing the default version 8.2 of the packages

sudo apt-get -y install php-fpm
sudo systemctl enable php8.2-fpm
sudo systemctl start php8.2-fpm

Modify Nginx

• Now that the php-fpm service is installed we should change the default Nginx server to make use of it.
• Edit the default server file:

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

• Add index.php to this line:

# Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

• Activate PHP processing by un-commenting this this section. Note that we use the UNIX socket and we are using 8.2 and not 7.4 which is specified originally in the config file.

# 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/php8.2-fpm.sock;
    #       # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets):
    #       fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
}

• Enable the hiding of .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.service

• Create a test .php file to confirm that it does work

sudo vi /var/www/html/test.php

• Contents

<?php
    phpinfo();
?>

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

Install MariaDB

Why MariaDB?

• We discovered that the version of MySQL that comes bundled by default with Debian 12 (bookworm) are breaking things on RADIUSdesk.
• 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 php8.2-mysql
sudo systemctl enable mariadb
sudo systemctl restart mariadb
sudo systemctl status mariadb

Disable strict mode

• With Debian 12 (bookworm), the bundled release of MariaDB is at version 15.1 which introduced a few Strict modes which have some problems with RADIUSdesk 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 MySQL Server

sudo systemctl restart mariadb