How to install PHP extensions on nginx?

Question

I recently discovered NginX, and decided to try it out on my server. I have NginX running and able to serve PHP and HTML files. But now I want to try to install drupal. When trying to install it and check the requirements, I am stopped by one requirement.

PHP extensions Disabled

Drupal requires you to enable the PHP extensions in the following list (see the system requirements page for more information):

gd

I have tried to install gd by doing apt-get install php5-gd, and it says it is already installed. So I created a phpinfo() file, and checked to see if gd was enabled and I wasn't able to find it. Does this have to do with NginX or PHP? What do I do to fix this?

Answer 1

Since you are using Nginx - that must mean you are running PHP with PHP-FPM.

After you install stuff you need to:

sudo /etc/init.d/php-fpm restart 

or

service php5-fpm restart

in newer ubuntu versions

so that PHP will pickup the new extensions.

Answer 2

If your web server setup is in order, only install the php gd extension and restart php scripting interpreter and web server.

sudo apt-get install php5-gd
sudo /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi stop
sudo /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx stop
sudo /etc/init.d/nginx start

Here's a great LEMP tutorial http://library.linode.com/web-servers/nginx/php-fastcgi/ubuntu-10.04-lucid