##Engintron is Nginx on cPanel
Nginx® is a powerful open source web server that was built to scale websites to millions of visitors. cPanel® is the leading hosting control panel worldwide.
Engintron integrates Nginx into cPanel so you can enjoy amazing performance for your sites, without having to sacrifice important hosting features found in cPanel or hiring a sysadmin.
First release features include: Nginx setup in reverse caching proxy (web acceleration) mode for any static or PHP based website, automated Nginx updates, amazingly simple dashboard to control Nginx, Apache, MySQL and PHP related day-to-day tasks in cPanel.
And best of all? Engintron is totally free to use!
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Login as root user in your server using an SSH connection and execute the following commands:
$ cd /
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nuevvo/engintron/master/engintron.sh
$ sh engintron.sh install
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Login as root user in your server using an SSH connection and execute the following commands:
$ cd /
$ sh engintron.sh remove
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Engintron is (currently) not designed for resellers using cPanel. It's designed for agencies, freelancers or individuals that use and manage cPanel on their own, for their or their customers' needs. As such, there is one simple rule for running Engintron on any cPanel based server: whenever a domain is added, modified or deleted on the server via cPanel/WHM, you need to execute "virtual host" synchronization. In other words, you need to manually "tell" Nginx that new domains have been added and allow it to reconfigure for these new domains. This can be done very easily from the Engintron dashboard, under WHM (it's in the "Plugins" section). Just click "Sync Nginx with Apache vhosts" in there and Nginx will be reconfigured for any domain changes on your server.
Alternatively, you can do this over SSH or via a cron. Assuming engintron.sh resides at the very root path of your server, just do this:
$ sh engintron.sh sync
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Engintron will make your cPanel based server fly, but it's important to have cPanel properly configured already.
Here are some basic configuration steps after you get a fresh cPanel server ready for you:
- Set the server time under: Home » Server Configuration » Server Time
- Disable all statistics under: Home » Server Configuration » Statistics Software Configuration
- Set this if it's not already setup by your hosting company: Home » Networking Setup » Resolver Configuration
- Disable unneeded services (e.g. DNS or mail services or spamd)
- Enable shell fork bomb protection under: Home » Security Center » Shell Fork Bomb Protection
- Enable: Home » Security Center » cPHulk Brute Force Protection - make sure to whitelist the IPs through which you'll be logging into your server as root
- Install CSF (an IPTables frontend and more) and make sure port 8081 is open. More info at: http://www.configserver.com/free/csf/install.txt
- Update MySQL under Software » MySQL Upgrade
- Install this EasyApache build https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nuevvo/engintron/master/engintron.dtd under Software » EasyApache (Apache Update) - make sure to select FCGI in the PHP Handler option (if it's not already selected)
- Symlink for APC (run as root):
$ ln -s /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525 /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20100525 - Install APC under Software » Module Installers » PHP Pecl (manage) - search for APC and install it. The previous symlink you set will allow APC to function properly (I still wonder why cPanel hasn't solved this bug in ages!)
- Setup your user accounts and domains in cPanel/WHM
- Install Engintron and enjoy!
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We have run various tests on various server configurations. Here's a typical test on a 2GB RAM VPS server running cPanel (Apache 2.2, FastCGI, APC enabled, MySQL query caching on) hosting a single Joomla! 3.x website (default installation).
Using Apache Benchmark (AB), we run the following test: $ ab -c 50 -n 5000 -k http://url/to/site
Apache 2.2 is able to handle 53.21 requests per second.
Because Nginx works in reverse caching proxy mode, when Engintron is installed, the results are simply stunning: 9086.38 requests per second - that's 2000 times more serving capacity compared to Apache!
If you run a busy site on a cPanel server, you can use the same AB test and see for yourself what you can gain from using Engintron.
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There are 5 key differences when comparing Engintron with other Nginx installers for cPanel.
First, Engintron is a single shell script (weighing only a few KBs) that installs all required software (to make Nginx work as intended) from the official software package vendors' repositories. And the installation is very fast (only a few seconds). And remember - unlike other "solutions", we don't bundle a copy of Nginx and we don't modify its binary files to put our names on it (yeap, true story)...
Second, since we're using the official repositories for Nginx, all Engintron software is updated whenever cPanel (or the server's software) is updated. So you essentially set it and forget it (so to speak). Whenever you perform "yum update/upgrade" or upgrade the server software from within WHM, Nginx will be updated if a new release is available. If something is changed on Engintron and you need to re-install it, you simply install it on top of the previous installation. You don't need to uninstall it first!
Third, you can safely uninstall Engintron and it will revert your entire system to how it was before. That means you can try Engintron and if you don't like it or you find it doesn't fit your needs, you can simply uninstall it.
Fourth, it has a simple dashboard with some handy utilities that make Engintron your day-to-day dashboard for cPanel. And wait till you see the new looks coming in version 2.
And finally, Engintron is open source. You can tear it apart or contribute back to its development. You can fork it, knife it, do whatever you want with it. It's not a black box :)
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Engintron installs Nginx as a reverse caching proxy in front of your Apache server. Think of it as your little CDN packed inside your cPanel server. This greatly speeds up your site and lowers resource consumption on your server.
But there is one specific drawback to using Nginx in reverse caching proxy mode as installed by Engintron: if you site allows user generated content (e.g. a forum), then Nginx will not work properly out-of-the-box. When you got users that login in the frontend and are able to browse user-specific content or upload/generate their own content (for example in a forum website), you need to write additional Nginx rules to make sure you exclude these user pages (e.g. the login/logout pages, the user's dashboard and so on). Additionally you need to setup cookie-based rules so that Nginx persistently "understands" when a user is logged in and therefore does not cache any page output for them. This way, the user pages will never by cached by Nginx and your users can interact with your site as they did before you installed Engintron.
Please note that we do already have 2 generic exlusion rules for the backend interface of Joomla and WordPress, built right into Engintron's installation process. But as you can understand, we cannot include such rules for any CMS that can be installed in cPanel. But since Engintron is open source, you can easily hack the vhost generation functions in Engintron and add your own rules.
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The next update of Engintron (v2) will feature a massively overhauled design. One that will possibly make Engintron your cPanel dashboard page.
And I'll make every effort to include the following features:
- A way to automatically sync Apache with Nginx vhosts when a new domain is added in cPanel (ideal for resellers)
- A way to disable Nginx entirely on select domains (by way of adding an identifier file or an entry in .htaccess)
- "Smarter" caching for user generated content in the frontend
- Apply automated MySQL optimisations based on system CPU & RAM
- More handy tools to be added: cleanup Apache logs and other un-needed directories in order to free up space in your /usr partition - a common problem for cPanel users
- A small frontend monitoring mini-dashboard for your server, entirely independent from WHM.
- Distribute alternatively as a cPanel plugin
- Paid support for Engintron (geared for professionals and hosting companies)
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Please post your feedback and any issues or feature requests/suggestions in the project's issue tracker at:
https://github.com/nuevvo/engintron/issues
==
Dec 23rd, 2014 - v1.0.4 Build 20141223
- Updated static asset loading from an HTTPS source
Dec 3rd, 2014 - v1.0.4 Build 20141203
- Since mod_rpaf was dropped from its original developer, it's now been updated with the fork that's been actively maintained here: https://github.com/gnif/mod_rpaf
- Moved all static assets of the app dashboard onto GitHub's CDN. This simply results to a cleaner Engintron script.
- Removed the line "proxy_hide_header Set-Cookie;" from proxy.conf as it was causing issues with WordPress websites not being properly cached (thank you @AgentGod)
May 30th, 2014 - v1.0.3
- Fixed compatibility with Munin, added Nginx tracking in Munin
- Enabled access logs for domains, but static file logging is disabled for performance reasons
- Switched default Nginx worker process to "auto" (aka CPU/core support), so it won't be required to be set manually
- Obsolete vhosts are now cleaned up whenever the sync process is performed
- Added some default Nginx files after setup in case they are not created during Nginx's installation
- Added default.conf vhost during installation
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Engintron is released under the GNU/GPL license. For more info, have a look here: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
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The development & testing cPanel server for Engintron is kindly sponsored by the awesome folks at EuroVPS: https://www.eurovps.com/
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A proper website is on its way, featuring short tutorials and videos, a forum and a commercial support channel.
The current backend in WHM is also under redesign.
More at: http://engintron.com
== Copyright © 2010-2014 Nuevvo Webware P.C.