I very recently launched shadowsinthegrass.com, a crowd-funding website for a short film I am working on. As a donator, you are able to upload an avatar to be presented with your credit. I had limited the file size to 2MB... or so I had thought.

Underneath, the site is built with Flask, served with Gunicorn, and behind an Nginx reverse proxy.

Unfortunately, I received reports that some uploads were failing and reported as "Error: undefined" to the user. Strangely, it didn't seem to be an error in the Python app, as I was not receiving any tracebacks when this error occurred.

It turns out that Nginx has some default configuration that I wasn't expecting.

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I recently started transitioning all of the websites under my management from Apache to nginx (mainly to ease running my Python webapps via gunicorn, but that is another story).

Since nginx will not directly execute PHP (via either CGI or nginx-managed FastCGI), the first step was to get PHP running at all. I opted to run php-cgi via daemontools; my initial run script was fairly straight forward:

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#!/usr/bin/env bash
exec php-cgi -b 127.0.0.1:9000

Couple this with a (relatively) straight forward nginx configuration and the sites will already start responding:

server {

    listen          80;
    server_name     example.com
    root            /var/www/example.com/httpdocs;

    index           index.php index.html;
    fastcgi_index   index.php;

    location ~ \.php {
        keepalive_timeout 0;
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$uri;
        fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
    }

}

The tricky part came when I wanted to run PHP under the user who owned the various sites. I could have (and perhaps should have) opted to spin up a copy of php-cgi for each user, but I decided to try something a little sneakier; PHP will set its own UID on each request.

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