Nginx gives 504 Gateway Time-out once moved to live

Question

I am planning to switch my website (drupal 6.25) from apache to nginx. i have prepared everything for nginx and tested it on port 81. it is working fine. and now i changed listen from 81 to 80 and stop apache and start nginx. the website starts giving

504 Gateway Time-out

nginx/0.8.54

and serves nothing :( my nginx server is

server {
        listen   80 backlog=128;
        root /var/www/web1/htdocs;
        index index.php index.html index.htm;        
        server_name www.example.com;

        location / {
        if (!-e $request_filename) {
                rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
                }
        }

        access_log /var/log/nginx.web1.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx.web1.error.log error;
        location ~* ^.+\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|css|png|js|ico)$ {
                rewrite ^/favicon.ico$ /sites/all/themes/sky/favicon.ico break;
                access_log        off;
                expires           30d;
        }
        location ~ \.php$ {
        include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
        #fastcgi_pass  127.0.0.1:9000; #I have tried this option as well
        fastcgi_pass  unix:/tmp/php.socket;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  /var/www/web1/htdocs/$fastcgi_script_name;
    }
}

and the nginx.conf contains:

user www-data;
worker_processes 5;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
        worker_connections 64;
        # multi_accept on;
}

http {

        ##
        # Basic Settings
        ##

        sendfile on;
        tcp_nopush on;
        tcp_nodelay on;
        keepalive_timeout 65;
        keepalive_requests      20;
        types_hash_max_size 2048;
        # server_tokens off;

        # server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
        # server_name_in_redirect off;

        include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
        default_type application/octet-stream;

        ##
        # Logging Settings
        ##

        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

        ##
        # Gzip Settings
        ##

        gzip on;
        gzip_static       on;
        gzip_disable "msie6";

        # gzip_vary on;
        # gzip_proxied any;
        # gzip_comp_level 6;
        # gzip_buffers 16 8k;
        # gzip_http_version 1.1;
        # gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

        ##
        # Virtual Host Configs
        ##

 include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
        include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}


#mail {
#       # See sample authentication script at:
#       # http://wiki.nginx.org/ImapAuthenticateWithApachePhpScript
#
#       # auth_http localhost/auth.php;
#       # pop3_capabilities "TOP" "USER";
#       # imap_capabilities "IMAP4rev1" "UIDPLUS";
#
#       server {
#               listen     localhost:110;
#               protocol   pop3;
#               proxy      on;
#       }
#
#       server {
#               listen     localhost:143;
#               protocol   imap;
#               proxy      on;
#       }
#}

any idea of what is wrong? or how can i fix it?
Thanks a lot for your help

Answer 1

You're trying to connect to PHP Fast-CGI on unix:/tmp/php.socket, but you're not running PHP Fast-CGI daemon. PHP-FPM is a separate daemon and nginx will not spawn it automatically.

See PHP documentation on deploying FastCGI Process Manager (FPM) and HOWTO for installing Nginix + PHP-FPM on Ubuntu

If you're using standard install, you're most likely will have a service named php-fpm or php5-fpm, which you should start and add to list of services started automatically.