There have been several fellow members of the Habari community that have decided to switch to Nginx lately. Knowing that I run Nginx exclusively (and set up and maintain the instance that hosts the Habari website itself), they’ve asked questions from time to time.
Unfortunately at work I’m stuck hosting PHP on various versions of Windows with IIS. For the most part things do just run (though I yearn for a nice Nginx + PHP-FPM setup that has decent URL rewriting), but figuring out what security settings to change so that PHP can write to a particular file or directory has always been a problem.
I don’t often have to deal with file uploads, but this morning I had to include one on a form I was developing for a project at work. I know Kohana has a decent Validation class and even provides an Upload helper for actually moving the file into place, but the examples were all spotty and / or confusing in different ways.
I ran into what is apparently a pretty common issue with users running PHP as some sort of CGI with the Nginx webserver. If you’re trying to detect whether a user is using SSL you normally check to see if $_SERVER['HTTPS'] == 'on'. Well apparently this is more of an Apache-only convention than I thought… It won’t work under Nginx, your PHP script will never see an HTTPS server value and will always think the connection is unencrypted (in my case with the SSL Admin plugin for Wordpress, resulting in an infinite loop back to the SSL version of the page).
I always run one trunk build or another of WordPress. Generally every few weeks I’ll svn up just to make sure I’ve got the latest code. Most of the time I don’t have any problems…