Enable PHP on BigBlueButton .71 Server

It’s been asked a couple times how to run PHP on a BigBlueButton (BBB) server. The following has been tested on the .71 BBB virtual image.

BBB uses nginx to route incoming web traffic red5, tomcat and some other stuff. Because of that, you can’t use any urls that start with /bigbluebutton, /deskshare, /client, /open/, /close, /idle/, /send/. But we can install php and enable it for other urls.

First we need to install php5-fpm. It’s not included in the ubuntu 10.04 php packages, so we’ll use a PPA for it.

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:brianmercer/php
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install php5-fpm

Open /etc/php5/fpm/php5-fpm.conf with your favorite editor and find the line that starts with listen, and edit to this:

listen = /var/run/php5-fpm.socket

Now we need to tweak the nginx site config file vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/bigbluebutton. At the end – but before the last } – we need to add the following block of code:

 location ~ .php$ {
    fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
    fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.socket;
    fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/bigbluebutton-default$fastcgi_script_name;
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_index index.php;
  }

This is optional, but if you may want to find the block that starts with location / { and add index.php to the list of indexes. This will allow you to use index.php if you use a url to a directory with no explicit filename.

Now restart php5-fpm:

sudo /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart

And restart nginx:

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Let’s test it out. Create a file /var/www/bigbluebutton-default/test.php with this:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Then test it by going to http://<ip>/test.php.

Now you can install any other php packages you may need for whatever you want to do – like php5-mysql…

You’ll need to run /etc/init.d/php5-fpm restart after installing php packages.