Nginx Unit changes how we host PHP (& Laravel)

Nginx Unit changes the game in how he host and containerize Laravel applications. We no longer need PHP-FPM, nor are limited by its max_children settings.

We cover installing and configuring Nginx Unit for use with PHP and Laravel.

Since we don't want to use the system-default PHP (instead wanting to use good old ppa:ondrej/php to install PHP), we need to manually compile the Nginx Unit PHP module - otherwise it attempts to load the wrong underlying PHP libaries.

Luckily that's pretty easy! We see how to run Unit, use it with a Laravel app, and discuss the pros & cons of Nginx Unit.

⌚️ Timestamps

00:00 Intro
00:05 What is Nginx Unit
01:47 Install PHP
03:49 Install Nginx Unit
05:39 Compile Unit's PHP Module
08:04 Create a Laravel app
09:28 Configure Unit
16:08 Nginx Unit Processes
17:50 The Good
19:21 The Bad

[vaviloffx]

Nice experiment! And thanks for listing the cons — the lack of Gzip compressions, inability to protect dot files and set cache headers for static files. We'll stick with good ol' nginx+PHP-FPM for now :D

[locusm]

From HN to video in under 24 hrs!
Having a play with this today so your timing is perfect.

[ryanvelbon]

Great content. Keep 'em coming please!

[DaviMartins]

Incredible content, Chris
Thank you!

[uxweb]

Wow! This looks so promising for PHP. It appears to have more steps involved for installing. What do you think it would be more simple? To install unit from a PHP base docker image or to install PHP from a unit base image? Thank you!

[tom]

I really appreciate this video, you are very good at explaining, I love that you go line by line. The only problem I have is with static files, for example a .txt file inside /public or the sitemap itself (.xml), do you have any idea how to handle this to make it work?

[cooltech]

I already have nginx server on my ubuntu 22.04 running for several project, I want to try nginx unit for my newest project, if I install this nginx unit, would it break my nginx and all related website?

[Loige]

This looks super convenient. I didn't came across it before, thanks a million for sharing it!

[gadelat]

According my tests unit-php can't handle concurrencty when script is doing sleep()

[packofblackdogs]

Unit is awesome, but I had slightly different approach: install containerized unit-php8.2 and then run laravel. Very neat result. Until I had to make some mysql queries and not sqlite3. But that's fixable too.

[fevangelou]

Might be interesting to benchmark Unit with a multi port config (attached to the same backend) & load balanced by some Nginx proxy config VS Unit with a processes config for a single port. All in all its definitely more flexible compared to FPM. And with some smart Nginx proxying, any non-PHP requests could be entirely offloaded to Nginx. That being said, if Unit's config also allowed defining the path to the unit-php binary, that would probably make a multi-PHP setup easier.

[thecaribcoder]

Been battling with this for hours now. For some reason keep getting the following error when I try to push the config

```
{
"error": "Invalid configuration.",
"detail": "The module to run \"php\" is not found among the available application modules."
}
```
Any ideas?

[hristijant]

Great content! Would love to hear your opinion on Laravel Octane with different application servers as well.